‘

u.
.-
II
.-
ll _

 

 

 

I‘VM‘FV:

 

 

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

Nature and Human Nature in the Major Novels
of Virginia Woolf

presented by
Sara Elizabeth Culver

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph.D. degree in English

 

 

will. A .

Major rofessor

Date October 30‘L 1980

0-7639 .

 

 

    
  

 

‘Wfi

!400 A080

 

 

OVERDUE FINES:

25¢ per day per item
RETURNING LIBRARY MATERIALS:

Place in book return to rauove
charge from emulation records

 

 

NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE
IN THE MAJOR NOVELS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

Sara Elizabeth Culver

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
1980

ABSTRACT

NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE
IN THE MAJOR NOVELS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

By
Sara Elizabeth Culver

The dissertation is a three-part study of the five

major novels of Virginia Woolf: The Voyage Out 1915,

Jacob's Room 1922, Mrs. Dalloway 1925, To The Lighthouse

 

1927, and The Waves 1931. The novels are studied not so

much as works of art in their own right, than as they
reveal the gradual maturation and development of their

author. One of the assumptions on which this work rests

is that a critic can know something about an author's
state of mind at the time a work was being created by a
careful examination of that work; that is, that the
metaphors an author uses are not merely arbitrary choices,
but a revelation of the artist's deepest self.

The first part deals with the way Woolf's nature

imagery changes over the years from The Voyage Out to

The Waves. The evolution of "Woolf's nature" is apparent

in the way her metaphors for the natural world change

from rather harsh, bleak ones in her first novel to warm

and lively ones in her second and continue to expand in

her later novels to reveal a profound and sensitive per-

ception of the human relationship to the natural world.

The second section of the study concerns Woolf's

changing relationship to her characters. The author of
The Voyage Out sketched characters with whom she could

rarely identify. The characters are not depicted with

any especial sympathy, and sometimes with antipathy. They

seem alienated from each other and from the world around

them. To some extent, the same is true of the characters

in Jacob's Room. In Mrs. Dalloway, however, Woolf starts

to empathize more deeply with her characters, and to portray

human beings who are sensitive to each other, and aware of

what is happening inside them. In To The Lighthouse, she

moves past the boundries of her self in the portrait of

In The Waves, she merges completely with

 

her parents.

her characters.

The third part of the study deals briefly with the

tion of whether or not Virginia Woolf had "a phiIOSOphy

is that she had not, because

ques

of life." The conclusion

her most cherished values were conflicting ones; and that

her ethos changed little over the years, except in the
way she felt about it.

The conclusion of the study is that the popular image

of Virginia Woolf as a "neurasthenic invalid" who was

heavily insukmed from the "real world" by her sex, her

' class, and her recurring illness needs to be revised. She

was in fact, a tough, courageous woman whose indomitable

will to face reality unflinchingly and without illusion

was both her salvation and her downfall.

Copyright by
Sara Elizabeth Culver

1980

For my daughter,

Elizabeth Aza

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

-Since I would have been unable to complete this work

without the c00peration and forbearance of my immediate

family, I wish to thank my mother, Melvina Culver, and my

daughter, Elizabeth; the former for her financial support
and the latter for her moral support (which was interrupted

only by occasional fits of exasperation with her mother's

absence). Both frequently sacrificed their time and energy

to give me space in which to work.

Also, I wish to thank those peOple whose help ranged

from encouragement and inspiration to help with typing and

proof-reading. My aunt, Dorothy Culver, generously donated

her time and energy to type a first draft and offer cogent

suggestions as to its content. My former teacher and

present friend, Beulah Monaghan, very kindly helped me

with the proof-reading. More important, however, has been

her continuing belief that I had something worthwhile to

say and the ability to say it well. To Herbert Greenberg,

in whose seminar I first became re-acquainted with Woolf,

and with whom I have frequently discussed Woolf's vision

of reality, I owe a great deal of the inSpiration for this

work. Marilyn Atlas' contributions to the completion of

this dissertation have ranged from moral support to critical

iii

commentary and from feminist inSpiration to help in locating

a typist. I wish to thank the members of my committee,

Russell Nye, and Linda Wagner for

To my major professor,

Richard Benvenuto,
donating their time to this project.
William Johnsen, whose support and encouragement never
flagged as he gallantly read his way through manuscripts
(complete with misspellings and cryptic erasures) as

obscure as "news from the Delphic Oracle" (his phrasing),

I owe a great deal of gratitude.

iv

Preface

I had hoped, in this study, to lay emphasis on the

strength and vitality of Virginia Woolf's character, and

perhaps to help revise the popular image of her as

”neurasthentic."
Even those critics who are basically sympathetic and

friendly to Virginia Woolf have tended to see her as
secluded and remote from the concerns of the rest of
humanity, or so delicate and frail and lacking in back—

bone that she cannot possibly be a good example of human

behavior. I believe her to be a person quite different

from the one that has come down to us: ”The Invalid Lady

of Bloomsbury" (coined by E. M. Forster).a Rather than

lay emphasis upon the fact that she had to muster enormous

psychic courage and energy to overcome her difficulties,

to live what was in fact an exciting, interesting, enor-

mously creative life, her critics have too Often chosen

to regard her perspective on life as not merely that
belonging to an (occasional) invalid, but invalid.

The adverse criticism Woolf has received was spear-
headed in the thirties by a group of malcontent
Journalists--Wyndham Lewis in particular--who considered

the "Bloomsbury group" to be a gathering of precious and

affected aesthetes, or in Lewis' own ill-chosen words,
"ill—mannered and pretentious dilettanti." Virginia

came to be considered the most precious,

Woolf apparently

affected, and irrelevant (if not the most ill-mannered!)

of this group, just possibly because of her sex. While

the ludicrousness of Lewis' charge is apparent to anyone

who knows how Woolf worked—-"di1ettante" is simply

astounding--nevertheless it was swallowed raw and

squirming by a wide readership. Partly, no doubt,
because Wyndham Lewis is easier to read than Virginia

Woolf. Someone once said, the bigger the lie, the more

and this seems to be the case with

effective it is,

Woolf. The myth is still with us, the myth that says

Woolf is "irrelevant" for anyone outside her own elite

and privileged group...that her vision of reality is

divorced from the experience of any normal person, that

it is interesting artistically, but that it has no valid

claim to an interpretation of any wider reality.

Woolf enjoys world-wide popularity; she has been
translated into a great number of languages--including

Hindi and Chinese--and it seems odd that this would be

so if she were "irrelevant." Paradoxically, it may be

that she has more to say to those whose lives have been

interrupted by war, or by some other upheaval of their

countries, than to those peOple whose lives have secure,

able, and fairly well-assured, that is, the

She has been accused

comfort

reasonably well—to-do middle class.

vi

of having led too comfortable, too insulated and too

insular an existence to have anything important to say

to those who have had to deal with the "real world."

For those who so accuse her, I can only remind them that

she had undergone childhood bereavement, sexual moles-

tation, successive mental and physical breakdowns,

incarceration, bombardment (World Wars 1 and 2) and,

finally, the prOSpect of being imprisoned in a Nazi

concentration camp. That she has been regarded as an

st shadings of

aesthete concerned only with the subtle

meaning——in light of the cold facts-~must be due to her

profound respect for her art and not due to the fact

tected from all violent shocks. For

that she was pro

she was not. Quite the reverse.

Her artistic position, that the only thing we can

be certain of is the moment, the here and now, and her

humanistic position, that the most important aspect of

human life is human love and human relationships, is

also the position taken by another well-known novelist

today, Jerzy Kosinski. No one has yet, to my knowledge,

accused the author of The Painted Birg_of having led a

sheltered existence. The position arrived at by both

authors-~one through internal chaos and the other through

s——is remarkably similar.

y of Woolf's work, and

external chao

It is a shame that the stud

tical consideration accorded her has been

the kind of cri

balked by the myth that she is too precious and irrelevant

vii

to be worthy of serious consideration...that she makes
too great a demand on her readers for too little return.
Certainly it cannot be denied that her work, espec-

ially The Waves, makes a great demand on the reader's

 

attention. However, Woolf makes no demand on the reader

that she does not repay many, many times over in an

enrichment of his vision, of his delight in seeing the

world through her very special perspective.

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION
PART I: NATURE
Chapter
1. IEE VOYAGE egg
2 gACOB's ROOM
3 MRS. DALLOWAY .
4. To THE LIGHTHOUSE .
5 THE WAVES
PART II: CHARACTER"
6. THE VOYAGE OUT
7. JACOH'S ROQM
8. 31913- DALLOWAX .
9. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE .
10. THE WAvgs .
PART III: ETHOS
11. DID VIRGINIA WOOLF HAVE A "PHILOSOPHY
OF LIFE?" . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
12. TRE VOYAGE cg:
13. JACOB'S ROQM
14. MRS. DALLOWA: .
15. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE .
16. THE WAVES

 

CONCLUSION

37
50
59
74

88

. 107
. 131
. 170
. 197

224

. 230
. 237
. 243
. 250

. 259
. 265

BIBLIOGRAPHY....................171
ENDNOTES......................174

INTRODUCTION

Virginia Woolf--from having been a lonely, almost mis-
anthropic young woman at the start of her career-~grew to
become a much more tolerant and accepting person in her
later years. Although she remained always rather shy and
aloof, in time she came to regard her fellow-humans with a
benevolent, rather than a sardonic, eye. The sometimes
bitter, almost paranoid, quality that is evident in The
Voyage Out recedes before a much more humane and balanced
view of the world. Over the course of perhaps twenty years,
Woolf's characters come closer to nature, closer to each
other, and closer to their creator, for she gradually
becomes more at peace with human beings and more at peace
with herself. There was no good reason why this should
have been so.

Woolf triumphed magnificently over conditions which
should have exacerbated all of her morbid tendencies. After
the worst of her mental breakdowns (which spanned almost
two years) she woke from that internal chaos to find her
country plunged into the more general madness of world
war.

Although Woolf would certainly want the influences of
her husband's love and care for her to be recorded as having

1

helped her to understanding, as well as the kindliness and
encouragement of such friends as Clive Bell, E. M. Forster,
and Lytton Strachey, nevertheless even these cannot ex—
plain her resilience and her astounding capacity for en-
joying life, even under the sword of Damocles. She found
the strength to create and the courage to feel joy despite
the constant threat of mental breakdown.

Virginia Woolf's novels are witness to her ability to
open herself to experience, to let herself be vulnerable to
life in spite of the terrible wounds it had dealt her. I
have used the biographical material to show how very far
she had to come...to show that her journey was not an easy,
nor a pre-ordained one, but one that could have stOpped
short anywhere along the way, in a madhouse, in sentimen-
tality, rather than emotional honesty, or in a bitter and
recriminating personality.

If we lose, for whatever reason, our ability to love
the present, we are condemned to love what is forever lost
to us. WOolf had more reason than most to believe that
happiness does not last, but she did not hesitate to reach
out for it when it came. Like Mrs. Ramsey in To The Light-
Qgggg, she had the courage "to grasp what she could not
hold."* She was that rare human being who looks upon the
world without illusion and yet without terror. She could

penetrate the veil of life's seeming SOliditY and design,

 

*An excerpt from a conversation with Herbert Greenberg.

 

straight through to the infinite depths beyond our ephe-
meral moment and yet not be paralyzed with fright or des-
pair.

At the outset of her artistic career, Woolf had a
chilling vision of the universe and a rather alienated posi—
tion in regard to her fellow creatures. It is somewhat off
the mark to ascribe that alienation to simple snobbishness-—
which, incredibly, has sometimes been done. She was unique
even in childhood, set apart by an almost over-active imagi-
nation and an intuitive grasp of human tragedy. Unhappily,
these traits were coupled with an inability to function
comfortably with peOple. Her awkwardness and her propen-
sity for getting herself into odd scrapes earned her the
childhood nickname of "Billy-goat,” and this stuck with her
even into adulthood. She was from the outset a shy and
unusual person.

When her mother died, Virginia was thirteen, and the
shock was naturally severe; in fact, it precipitated her

first mental breakdown. However, in Moments of Being, a

 

recently published book of autobiographical sketches, she
writes that even worse than her mother’s death was the
ritual of Victorian mourning (terribly overdone by her
guilt-ridden father), and the years of "stupid suffering"
imposed by him in following that ritual. Moreover, her

adolescence was even worse than most girls would have

suffered under the circumstances due to the fact that her
half-brother, George, an obtuse and insensitive philistine,
took charge of his half-sisters' lives. Under his reign,
Virginia and her elder sister, Vanessa, suffered a good
deal of bullying in the process of being introduced to what
George considered "good society." Vanessa nearly died of
boredom, and Virginia went through agonies of embarrassment
because of her shyness. In addition to his other short—
comings, George was given to making incestuous advances.
This might not have been so traumatic as it was, had Vir-
ginia found him at all admirable or attractive. The depth
of her cold rage at being so used is apparent in her des-
criptions of George in her reminiscences.

Even before her mother died, however, there is ample
evidence to support the theory that Virginia did not re-
ceive enough of the nurturance and affirmation she needed
to feel secure and comfortable with herself and her gift.
Under the circumstances, her mother's death would have been
agony enough, but during the era that followed, she lost
first her half-sister Stella, who had tried to take her
mother‘s place, and her idolized elder brother, Thoby.
Finally, her father died very slowly and painfully of cancer.

Thus, brutally, was the truth forced upon her that
human destiny is not in human hands, and that the utmost

one can do is not delude oneself about the matter. Looking

back on her youth, she wrote of her feelings at the time

of Thoby's death:

....at fifteen to have that protection removed,...
to see cracks and gashes in that fabric, to be cut
by them, to see beyond them--was that good? Did it
give one an experience that even if it was painful,
yet meant that the gods (as I used to phrase it)
were taking one seriously....I would see....two
great grindstones and myself between them. I
would typify a contest between myself and "them”
—-some invisible giant. I would reason, or fancy,
that if life were thus made to rear and kick, it
was at any rate, the real thing....So I came to
think of life as something of extreme reality...
this, of course, increased my feelings of my own
importance. Not in relation to human beings: in
relation to the forces which had respected me
sufficiently to make me feel what was real.1

While she was young, in spite of her disclaimer, this know-
ledge tended to make her feel rather bitterly superior;
when she was older, it manifested itself as an utter lack
of interest in plot. For the same reason she was not inter-
ested in character as destiny, but rather in character as
perceptor of reality. A question that always interested
her was this: how much reality can this personality endure
or reveal? Sensitivity was for her the most valuable human
trait, and, highly as she values intelligence, she does not
admire the emotionally dead savant.

The largeness and beauty of each character's inner
Space is dictated by that individual's capacity to inter-
pret reality. 80 Rachel, in The Voyage Out, finds the

world larger and more interesting as she herself matures.

She was conscious of emotions and powers which she
had never suSpected in herself, and of a depth in
the world hitherto unknown.
The more we know of ourselves, the richer nature becomes
for us; we look out upon the universe only as far as we
see into ourselves.

Before I start to trace WOolf's deveIOpment, I will
discuss briefly some of the more recent criticism which
relates her life to her work. In following WOolf's devel—
Opment, I have concerned myself with three major areas:
in Part I her relationship to nature; in Part II her rela-
tionship to her characters; and in Part III her relation-
ship to the world. Implicit in the discussion of nature is
her relationship to time because it is in her use of natural
imagery that she reveals her concern at its passing.

Reflected in the narrator's perceptions is the expand—
ing consciousness of the implied author; she sees more
beauty, depth, and richness in the world with each succeed-
ing novel. Her journey is one from alienation to reconcili-
ation, from an embittered loneliness to a serene solitude.
When the five novels are read in sequence, it is strikingly
apparent that Woolf's treatment of nature changes abruptly
from paranoid dislike to rhapsodic celebration; less ab-
ruptly, her characters become sympathetic and then empa-
thetic, and finally, her perception of the world changes

from paranoia to awe.

The underlying premise of the study of her natural
imagery is that human beings tend to project onto the natural
or non—human world those feelings which either are blocked
in their expression towards other human beings, or inspired
by them, or both. An example of this can be found in Swann's
Way when the young Proust, in his famous passage on the Haw-
thorne hedge, recounts expressing sentiments towards the
flowering trees which would have been more properly ad-
dressed to his mother. Another very explicit example of

this is found in Mrs. Dalloway. The narrator takes time

 

out to comment on the scenery as Peter Walsh drowses beside
the nurse in one of London's parks, and digresses elab-
orately upon the manner in which trees and shrubs, seen by
a solitary traveler from a distance, seem to take on, not .
only human form, but also qualities of humanity: benignity,
generosity, kindliness; or, in Woolf's words,

....this figure, made of sky and branches as it is,

had risen from the sea....as a shape might bessucked

up out of the waves to shower down from her magni-

ficent hands compassion, comprehension, absolution.3

In The Voyage Out, Woolf's first novel and seven years

 

in the making, there is no sense of nature bestowing ”com-
passion, comprehension, or absolution." There, her inner
landscape, where she must go in order to find her fictional
world, seems greatly at variance with her external land-

scape.

Certainly one gathers from her letters that Virginia
Stephen took a great deal of pleasure and comfort from the
natural beauty around her; she especially enjoyed going
back to Cornwall, where she had Spent such happy summers
as a child, but this is not reflected in her first novel.

The subconscious forms its own landscape, a landscape
likely to surface only in dreams, fantasies, or, if one is
a writer, in literary creations. That landscape which is
subconscious is largely oneself, or reflects one's feelings
about the world. A desert one crosses in a dream is a for-
midable barrier in oneself; a mountain on the distant hori—
zon may be an eminence one dares only dream of attaining;
an ocean holds one's own deepest being. In The Voyage Out,
the beauty of the ocean is politely acknowledged, but its

vastness is what one remembers; it can swallow The Euphro-

 

§yg§ without a trace.

When I Speak of "nature" I am referring to everything
which is not part of the human consciousness, or, roughly
speaking, to the physical world. Since the philosophers
of science have not decided to their complete satisfaction
the precise difference between "mind” and “brain," I will
leave my definition at that. Thoreau, musing upon the rela—
tionship of his own body to the granite ribs of the moun—
tain upon which he stood, wrote that there was something

in nature that was not "bound to be kind to man" and that

he "feared to meet bodies....rather than spirits." Our
flesh, if we believe what science tells us, is composed
from the dust of stars and will be stars again. Our sub—
stance is eternal; our thoughts are not.

In Woolf's first two novels, The Voyage Out and Jacob's

 

Room, nature and human consciousness are fairly well sepa-
rated; it is not hard to draw lines of demarcation between
the world of human concerns and everything which lies out-
side that realm. However, as Woolf matures, both as a per-
son and an artist, these two worlds, the natural and appar-
ently objective, and the conscious, subjective world, tend
to merge and overlap and blend into each other in a way
that makes it difficult to talk about each one separately.
In each succeeding novel, the distance between them dimin-
ishes.

This gradual integration of the human and natural
worlds is evidence of Woolf's reconciliation with both.
The natural world is no longer feared as "the enemy," and
the human beings in it are no longer "the unenlightened
masses."

Woolf's fundamental outlook--so far as a system of
beliefs or values goes--does not seem to have changed in
its skeleton fOrm over the years from The Voyage Out to
The Waves. For example, she remained an atheist. She

never subscribed to any form of organized religion (she

10

found such beliefs both amusing and contemptible). She
was, in her overall view, somewhat of a pessimist. And
yet, she was not a nihilist; for her, the joys of creation
are more worth cultivating than the joys of destruction.
Her vision is a profoundly humanitarian one. She never
gave serious consideration to Nietzschean Optimism; not
only was it silly and distasteful to her, but the tyrant
or dictator is as much at the mercy of chance as the poet.
While she regarded human beings and their creations as
ephemeral, she felt that a humane philosophy was the only
one that made sense, for it encourages the develOpment of
intelligence and sensitivity, without which human beings
lack dignity. Nevertheless, she was aware that she had no
rational foundation for her humanism.

Since she believed there was really no consciousness
in the universe besides human consciousness, she could not
(rationally) believe in the existence of a past outside
human memory. In "A Sketch of the Past" however, she re-
flects on the vividness of some of her earliest memories
and speculates on the reason for their overwhelming force.

Those moments--in the nursery, on the road to the

beach--can still be more real than the present

moment. This I have just tested. For I got up
and crossed the garden. Percy was digging the
asparagus bed; Louis was shaking a mat in front

of the bedroom door, but I was seeing them through

the sight I saw here--the nursery and the road

to the beach. At times I can go back to St. Ives
more completely than I can this morning. I can

ll

reach a state where I seem to be watching things
happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose,
that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so
that it seems as if it were happening independently,
though I am really making it happen. In certain
favorable moods, memories-~what one has forgotten--
come to the top. New if this is so, is it not pos—
sible-~I often wonder-~that things we have felt with
great intensity have an existence independent of

our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if
so, will it not be possible, in time, that some
device will he invented by which we can tap them?4

Laying aside for a moment Woolf's astounding powers of
imagination, it seems that she wishes to establish some
objective measure of reality outside the human realm.
While she supposes that she is the one responsible for
these memories, she wonders if perhaps they do exist--
somewhere-~outside herself. Unless one posits a god, what
memory is there besides human memory? And what happens to
our past if there is no record of it? What can it possibly
matter, then, what we do? Whatever we do must be done in
reference to human memory-«and human memory is lamentably
short.

There are other problems too. Woolf, unlike most of
us, could not blind herself to the implications of fate‘s
complete indifference.

I am under the impression of the moment...which is

shot through with the accident I saw this morning--

a woman crying. oh, oh, oh, faintly pinned against

the railings with a motor car on tOp of her. All

day I have heard that voice...A great sense of the
brutality and wildness of the world remains with

me--there was this woman in brown walking along
the pavement--suddenly a red film car turns a

12

somersault, lands on tOp of her and one hears this

oh, oh, oh?

That she could assert humane values, human dignity,
was not the effect of a shallow Optimism; hers was not the
sleepy contentment of an insulated and feeble imagination,
but an ecstasy born of agonizing knowledge that our notion
of "destiny" is a palliative for disguising the unpleasant
reality.

The concept of atheism is not difficult to embrace--
for the mind--but the emotional reSponse at finding oneself
aboard a rudderless ship in dangerous waters can be terror.

Woolf progressed from the point where she saw human
beings as lost and insignificant, floundering in the shore-
less ocean of the infinite universe, to a point where she
could see them as bold explorers, rejoicing in the voyage
itself, knowing that their discoveries, their joy and exhil—
aration in the journey, are all that matter, that there is
no land in sight, that the only fixed stars in the firma-
ment are birth and death, and that they can face this last
secure in the knowledge that they have not been either
deluded by a mirage or panicked by the discovery that there

iS no shore.

Virginia Woolf, although she is primarily discussed as
a writer whose main contribution was a new literary style,

left us a legacy even more valuable: her courage.

13

The criticism which seems most relevant to the concerns
of my dissertation is the psychological or biographical
kind. There has been a great deal of interest in Woolf's
psychological make-up and psychology has been the basis for
much of the recently published criticism about her. This
was spurred no doubt by the publication of Leonard Woolf's
autobiography wherein he discusses his wife's mental illness
and her personality at some lengths, and by Quentin Bell's
biography of his aunt.

I have selected three critics who seem to me to have
been representative of the kind of studies being done on
Woolf. Phyllis Rose, especially, has already gained a wide
audience, and Roger Poole is notable for his unorthodox
position vis-a—vis Leonard Woolf. All three (as well as
myself) are interested in the effect of her illness upon
her personality and the extent to which it influenced her
work.

The studies I have found most interesting are Jean

Love's Virginia Woolf, Leonard Poole's The Unknown Virginia

 

Woolf, and Phyllis Rose's biography, Women of Letters. This

 

last book came out in 1978, when I had been working on my
dissertation for two years. As I scanned the book, my
first reaction was that Rose had written and published my
dissertation. Closer examination proved this to be untrue.
While I think that Rose's study is interesting and

valuable, I feel that she accepts too readily the idea that

14

Woolf was "sheltered," or even ”snobbish" (the reason she
gives for Woolf's disliking James Joyce). And although it

is necessary to examine Woolf's work from a feminist perspec—
tive, that is not-~as Rose seems to imply--its greatest
value. It is not the political aspect of her work that
”....is the key to revising the image of her as an isolated
and somewhat precious technician."6

She is both sympathetic and generous in estimate of
Virginia Woolf, her criticism interesting and enlightening,
and she is an excellent writer and will surely reach a wide
audience. It is for this reason that I am all the more dis-
tressed by her concluding paragraph, in which she states
that Virginia Woolf was "terrified of life."

Love's study is based on a careful perusal of the let-
ters of Julia and Leslie Stephen, both before and after
their marriage. About half the book is devoted to an explana-
tion of their temperaments and personalities, and the way
they affected each other. Since they were both great letter-
writers, Love has been able to discover a great deal about
their marriage and the upbringing of their children. Appar-
ently even Quentin Bell had not been able to read all of
his grandparents' correspondence prior to writing Virginia's
biography.

Love is very thorough, and on the matter of the factors

contributing to Virginia's later emotional disturbances,

15

quite sound. However, I disagree with her on the issue of
George and Gerald Duckworth's caresses. (She seems to feel
that Woolf exaggerated their importance or even liked them.)
It is true that Virginia may have felt some ambivalence
about them; but that does not alter the fact that they were
molestations, and a violation of her right to the privacy
and integrity of her body. Nor, as I point out in the
chapter on ”Mrs. Dalloway," do I believe that her shyness
in sexual matters was "natural.” What bothers me most
about Love's study is that she apparently feels not only
that Virginia failed to develop or mature in certain emo-
tional ways, but that this immaturity extended to Woolf's
analytic or rational intellectual powers. For example, she
cites a passage from one of Virginia's letters to her sisters
-—written on Christmas day from Cornwall, 1909--as evidence
that Virginia, at the age of twenty-seven, believed that
Cornwall and London were literally two different worlds,
each with its own separate sky. This is the quotation.

....it suddenly struck me how absurb it was to stay
in London with Cornwall going on all the time.7

Also, in the unpublished version of The Voyage Out Love
discovered a passage in which Rachel Vinrace refers to "...
a world other than the immediate world of space and time, a
better and more Spiritual world of peace and sanity."8
Since Love does not quote the full passage, it is difficult

to know exactly how she was able to construe this meaning

16

from it. The noteworthy thing, I should think, is that
Virginia cut the passage from the version she wanted pub—
lished. I point out that the author, especially at this
time in her life, may have yearned for a transcendent world
of beauty, harmony, and order, but that it was precisely
because she didn't believe in such a world that she was so
frustrated and upset. While Love says that Woolf's ”naive
cosmology is implicit in some of her novels,”9 she does not
offer any other support for her belief. I would like to
point out that evidence for a belief in a transcendent world
of peace, order, beauty, goodness, etc., is rather notice-
ably lacking in Woolf‘s work. Her whole vision of art and
life is based not only on an intellectual belief that our
world is the only one we have, but on a profound emotional
grasp of this rather disturbing vision.

There is not much doubt that her periods of insanity
gave her a perspective that is not available to everyone,
but that she saw the world as she did through a veil of
confusion, especially such an obvious one as Love describes,
when she was not insane, seems palpably false. If there is
more evidence for such a viewpoint, I would like to see it.
I am not convinced by what she has offered thus far.

Poole's work has probably been the most provocative
because, while Quentin Bell regards his uncle as a hero,

and, as Rose puts it, "....a martyr to his wife's illness"

17

Poole charges him with being—~albeit unwittingly-—the major
source of his wife's difficulties. He does not question
Leonard's devotion to Virginia, but charges him with being
too strongly convinced of the rightness of his own Opinion
(that his wife was mad) to listen to her version of her
mental state.

Poole's main criticism of Quentin Bell's use Of the
term "mad" to describe his aunt is that it is an ”insulting"
and "degrading" word to use; he objects to the word "insane"
for the same reasons. He doesn't mind using the word "con—
fused" or the phrase ”mental breakdown." It seems that
Poole is expecting (in retrospect) the impossible of Leonard
Woolf or of anyone who was trying to be of help to Virginia
at the time. The idea that peOple could be treated by
discussing their condition with them-~especially when they
were incoherent-—was absolutely unheard of. Poole makes
much of the notion that Virginia was unable to tell Leonard
about George, but Quentin Bell writes (of Virginia's frigid-
ity)

Vanessa, Leonard and, I think, Virginia herself
were inclined to blame George Duckworth}o

Apparently all three family members had discussed the effect
of George's nocturnal pawings on Virginia's responsiveness
or lack thereof.

He does, I think, misinterpret the reasons for Virginia's

not having children, and for her having a bedroom separate

18

from her husband. He makes it all Leonard's responsibility,
and seems to interpret Virginia's letters to her husband
during her incarceration at TWickingham as evidence that
she desired a sexual relationship with him. This, in light
of the fact that Poole discourses extensively on her fri—
gidity and unwillingness to engage in intercourse, does not
seem logical. Roger Poole is very sympathetic to Virginia,
and his interpretation is rather touching because one senses
that he has fallen in love with his subject (is perhaps
jealous of Leonard?), and feels that he would have succeeded
in making her happy. He is quite determined to see her frus—
tration as mostly Leonard's fault. His comparison of Clarissa
to Virginia is very different from mine.

She is left lying in her narrow bed, with her vir—

ginity wrapped round her like a sheet, awake in the

darkness, waiting for Leonard-Richard to come back

from one of his committee meetings. 11
It is true enough that she longed for the full expression of
her sensual self, but it is also equally true that she would
not have responded positively to any expression of affection
that asked her to give herself sexually. There was one
passage in Poole's work that offended me.

.perhaps Virginia knew that Leonard could never

see what it was she wanted of him» and considered

that, loving as he was, it was all her own fault,

as she should never have married him. (Another

cigarette. Let's get on with the next review--

essay--novel—-draft. Time must be filled in

somehow, and writing is the best way to fill it.
Those interminable reading lists: the Greeks,

19

the Elizabethans, the eighteenth century, the modern
novel, history, psychology, biography. FOr her
reading was morphia.
This passage smells very much like ”All she needs is a good
lay." The last sentence is particularly Offensive. One
wonders why it is that no one refers to unmarried male
authors as being possibly "unfulfilled" or suggests that a
large artistic output or wide range of intellectual inter-
ests is a sign of sexual frustration-~in the case of a man.
Certainly there have been male authors who regretted their
childlessness. John Stewart Mill is said to have remarked
that he would exchange his entire body of work for the
privilege of being able to hold a grandchild on his knee.
To continue, I would like to mention a monOgraph by
Miyeko Kamiya entitled, "Virginia Woolf: An Outline of a
Study on her Personality, Illness and Work," which appeared
in 1965. This tantalizing paper promised an excellent piece
of work which is either still in progress or has--unhappily—~
been abandoned, for I can find nothing else by the author on
that subject. In it she describes Woolf's mental illness
as a combination of manic-depressive and schiZOphrenia, and
she relates Woolf's work to her illness, contending not that
She had a narrow and cloistered vision of reality, but that
she had been privileged to witness an extension of reality,
or, in Kamiya's words,

In the passionate anguish behind her presentation
of Septimus' suffering and suicide we sense her

20

indignation at how peOple of the world, including
psychiatrists, could go on in life unconcerned and
self-complacent, ignoring the deep and tragic reali-
ties of the human mind that lie hidden to their
shallow vision. And Virginia Woolf could not but

be poignantly aware of these realities; it was at
this price that She was able to create what she

did create.

She too mentions Woolf's courage.

If the human mind is that which is "faced with his

world and even with himself"...we must call Virginia's

mind a courageous one that faced the strange facts

of her inner world with wonder and without self-

deception, in solitude and suffering; that tried

the utmost it could do to understand these facts

and to express them into works of art.
I find the evidence for Woolf's courage in the fact that she
was able to face the depths of the universe without and the
vastness of the night within unsupported by any illusions
of divine guidance or superior purpose. This would have
been quite an achievement for anyone—~especially at that
period of history--but she had to live with the knowledge
that she was dependent upon a rather frail constitution for
her sanity, and that alone would have been sufficient temp-
tation for most peOple to abandon rationalism in favor of
mysticism.

Not only was her vision a courageous one, her attempt
to capture her vision carried with it some risk. When she
drew on her memory and imagination too for the materials of

Rachel's delirium, Septimus' madness, or even the more

unpleasant insights she ascribes to Bernard, she is leaning

21

over a well of pain and sorrow and even terror wherein she
risks being mesmerized...or even drowned.

Quentin Bell's assessment of the danger Woolf incurred
in writing the scenes of Rachel's delirium in The Voyage
Out may be correct; at any rate, his speculation is provoca-
tive.

In the final chapters of The Voyage Out she had been

playing with fire. She had succeeded in bringing

some of the devils who dwelt within her mind hugely

and gruesomely from the depths, and she had gone

too far for comfort. That novel and the effort of

giving it to the world had taken her over the edge

of sanity.15
She knew she had a unique experience to offer the world, and
she was going to present it, in spite of the risk. The
revelation of the self is one of the most difficult things
a writer can do. Serious art demands the kind of adherence
to real experience that means exposing the unique and per-
sonal in oneself, and that is dangerous enough for an
ordinary person, let alone one like the author of The Voyage
Out. How much easier to hide behing some conventional per-
sona, a mask whose relationship to oneself one can deny,
than to honestly reveal oneself. How much courage it
must take when that self is possibly so unique as to be

called ”insane"?

In Jacob's Room She was trying for something completely

 

new. Breaking with tradition takes a certain daring. How-
ever, it was not only in the art of the novel that her

courage showed; it was also in her continued refusal to

22

ascribe the horrors Of war and her own madness to some kind
of "divine purpose." After what she had been through, it
would have been understandable if she had retreated into
some safely conventional position--vis-a-vis both life and

art--rather than take any further risks.

That she returned, in Mrs. Dalloway, to the theme of

 

madness--and tried to reproduce certain aspects of it--was
certainly courageous, especially if Quentin Bell's assess-
ment of the situation is correct: that writing about her
madness in The Voyage Out helped bring on her worst break-
down. The fact that she was willing to delve into those
horrible memories--which she admits in A Writer's Diary was
a strain--and risk losing herself in them points to a love
for her art so passionate that she was willing to risk

everything for it.

Part I: Nature

Chapter 1

The Voyage Out

If The Voyage Out (1915) is less explicit than Heart of

 

 

Darkness (1900) in defining nature as "vengeful,"1 Virginia
Woolf seems to agree with Joseph Conrad that nature is an
"implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention."2
The immensity of the landscapes against which the characters
are sketched, their feelings of oppression and uneasiness
before that vastness, their sense that the purely generative
forces in human beings are essentially a-human, in-different
to human values, and finally, the futile efforts of humanity
against disease, convey a final impression of a vast, brood-
ing and malevolent world. Human beings in Woolf's South
American landscape are completely alienated from the natural
world around them. ”On and on it went in the distance, the
senseless and cruel churning of the water,”3 Helen Ambrose,
when the party is in the jungle, muses about the fragility

of human beings.

How small the little figures looked wandering through
the trees! She became acutely conscious of the little
limbs, the thin veins, the delicate flesh of men and
women, which breaks so easily and lets the life escape
compared with these great trees and deep waters. A

23

24

falling branch, a foot that Slips, and the earth

has crushed or the water drowned them.4

In Spite of its tropical setting, The Voyage Out takes
place in a bleak atmosphere. Rarely does the reader enjoy
a sense of the lushness or richness of nature; instead, the
references to "infinite sun-dried earth, earth pointed in
pinnacles,"5 "the stiff and hostile plants of the south,"6
and to "trees and undergrowth which seemed to be strangling
each other...in a multitudinous wrestle,"7 all suggest an
uninviting topography. There are few descriptions that
Show delight in natural beauty, either on the part of the
narrator or her characters.

Mrs. Ambrose's artistic fantasy of the land to where
She is traveling seems more alluring than the reality she
will confront. Here, she is creating the South American
jungle in needlepoint.

She chose a thread from the vari-coloured tangle

that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the bark

of a tree, or yellow into the river torrent. She

was working at a great design of a tropical river

running through a tropical forest, where Spotted

deer“would eventually browse upon masses Of fruit,

bananas, oranges, and giant pomegranates, wh11e

a troop of naked natives whirled darts into the

air.8
Once actually out in the jungle, her reaction is different
from the one she anticipated. "...She thought the country
Very beautiful, but also sultry and alarming."9 Moreover,

She is not the only one who finds the jungle more oppressive

than stimulating.

25

The sun was going down, and the water was dark and
crimson. The river had widened again, and they were
passing a little island set like a dark wedge in the
middle of the stream. Two great birds with red lights
on them stood there on stilt-like legs, and the beach
of the island was unmarked, save by the skeleton
print of the bird's feet. The branches of the trees
on the bank looked more twisted and lurid than

ever, and the green of the leaves was lurid and
splashed with gold. Then Hirst began to talk,
leaning over the bow.

'It makes one awfully queer, don't you find?’ he
complained. 'These trees get on one's nerves--

it's all so crazy. God's undoubtedly mad, What

sane person could have conceived a wilderness like
this, and peOpled it with apes and alligators? I
should go mad if I lived here-~raving mad.10

The beauty of the scenery doesn't seem to be felt (if
at all) by the characters or by the narrator. Certainly the
description of the jungle sunset quoted above comes from the
mind of an omniscient narrator, and she seems to share St.
John Hirst's point of View. "Dark and crimson” suggests
blood, and ”skeleton," "twisted,” ”angular," and ”lurid"
are all adjectives appropriate to a house of horrors.

Rachel, too, while the party is still at sea, dreams of
the beauty of the trOpical jungle.

Visions of a great river, now blue, now yellow in

the trOpical sun and crossed by bright birds, now

white in the moon, now deep in shade with moving

trees and canoes sliding out from the tangled

banks, beset her.11
She is perhaps more depressed by the dank reality of the
jungle than any of the others. The trOpical jungle, the
river, that seem to their imaginations to hold so much

romance and to promise such fulfillment of their need for

adventure, turns out to be sadly disappointing.

26

The split between their imaginative picture of nature
and their author's imaginative picture of nature is com-
plete. Woolf, whether or not she meant to, subtly mocks
their romantic vision.

The reader flucuates between a sense of claustrophobia
(in the jungle) and a sense of utter unimportance (on the
mountaintOps). This scene, for example, suggests the ten—
sion one experiences when confronted with the inescapable
evidence of finitude.

One after another they came out on the flat space

on top and stood overcome with wonder. Before

them they beheld an immense Space-—grey sands

running into forest merging in mountains, and

mountains washed by air,--the infinite distances

of South America. A river ran across the plain,

as flat as the land, and appearing quite as sta-

tionary. The effect of so much Space was at

first rather chilling. They felt themselves very

small and for some time no one said anything.

Then Evelyn exclaimed 'Splendidl' She took

hold of the hand ngxt her; it chanced to be
Miss Alan's hand.

There is something insincere about Evelyn's enthusiasm
since she reaches out blindly for a human hand as she Speaks,
not even caring whose it is. Clarissa Dalloway, on a simi-
lar occasion, eXpresses clearly and bluntly her sentiments
about scenery: "Honestly, though...I don't like views.
They're too inhuman..."13

The scenery that greets the voyagers when they finally
disembark on the shores of South America is bleak and inhos-

pitable, and the garden surrounding their house is unin—

viting.

27

Bushes waved their branches across the paths, and
the blades of grass, with Spaces of earth between
them, could be counted. In the circular piece of
ground in front of the verandah were two cracked
vases, from which red flowers drOOped, with a stone
fountain between them, now parched in the sun....

A few trees shaded it, and round bushes with wax-
like flowers mobbed their heads together in a row. 4

The sunlight in The Voyage Out is never life-giving sun; it

 

is either Oppressively hot or depressingly revealing.

The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking
of the waves on the shore sounded like the repeated
sigh of some exhausted creature, and even on the
terrace under an awning the bricks were hot, and
the air danced perpetually over the Short dry grass.
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 curled and yellow. Only
the stiff and hostile plants of the south, whose
fleshy leaves seemed to be grown upon spines, still
remained standing upright and defied the power of
the sun to beat them down. It was too hot to talk,
and it was not easy to find anylbook that would
withstand the power of the sun.

The sunlight betrays all the ugliness, the harshness
of the landscape, rather than enhancing it.

The day increased in heat as they drove up the hill.
The road passed through the town, where men seemed
to be beating brass and crying 'Water,' where the
passage was blocked by mules and cleared by whips
and curses, where the women walked barefoot, their
heads balancing baskets, and cripples hastily dis-
played mutilated members; it issued among steep
green fields, not so green but that the earth showed
through. Great trees now shaded all but the centre
of the road, and a mountain stream, so shallow and
so swift that it plaited itself into strands as it
ran. raced along the edge. Higher they went....
next they turned along a lane scattered with stones,
where Mr. Pepper raised his stick and silently indi-
cated a shrub, bearing among sparse leaves a volumi-
nous purple blossoms; and at a rickety cgnter the
last stage of the way was accomplished.

 

28

While the ugliest part of the passage describes the human
beings, nevertheless the natural scenery isn't very attrac-
tive either. It isn't so much life—giving as challenging;
rather than being full of life and movement, it is somber
and still. The metaphor of a mountain stream "plaiting it—
self into strands" isn't one that suggests the fluidity of
water, but rather qualities of dryness and stringiness,

like hair or hemp. All through The Voyage Out, natural

 

scenes and landscapes are presented as still, ominously
still. There are few images that suggest lightness, move-
ment, change, such as those that pervade later works. In
this passage, for example, the only things that move are
those we expect to move: gardeners and peacocks. The hills
are not "running" nor the flowers ”burning"; the descrip-
tions, although unusually beautiful for The VoyggeOut, are
fairly conventional.

Great tracts Of earth lay not beneath the autumn
sun, and the whole of England, from the bald moors
to the Cornish rocks was lit up from dawn to sunset,
and showed in stretches of yellow, green, and purple.
Under that illumination even the roofs of the great
towns glittered. In thousands of small gardens,
millions of dark-red flowers were blooming, until
the 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....Long-tailed birds
clattered and screamed, and crossed from wood to
wood, with golden eyes in their plumage.17

There is life and movement here, but much less than is evi-

dent in her later prose, where nearly all the scenery is in

29

motion. As Woolf approached middle age, "time” rather than
"nature" became her foe. The fear that time is slipping
away pervades all her later work. In her youth, She looks

rather enviously upon the distant horizon and sees only

that it will outlast her.

The time of Elizabeth was only distant from the
present time by a moment of space compared with the
ages which had passed Since the water had run between
those banks, and the green thickets swarmed there,
and the small trees grown to huge wrinkled trees in
solitude. Changing only with the change of the sun
and the clouds, the waving green mass had stood there
century after century, and the water had run between
its banks ceaselessly, sometimes washing away earth
and sometimes the branches of trees, while in other
parts of the world one town had risen upon the ruins
of another town, and the men in the towns had begome
more and more articulate and unlike each other.

Her depictions of the Portuguese Shoreline, and also the
horizon of South America, are quite conventional "Still
life" landscapes. There is only a suggestion of lightness
in the notion of houses "nesting like sea-birds" and the
description of the mountains "rising" is too hackneyed a
cliche to inSpire any emotional or esthetic response. Even
the ocean, whose waves will come to embody the essence, the
pulse of universal life, is here merely quiescent, its calm:
the absence of life, rather than its cradle.
The water was very calm; rocking up and down at the
base of the cliff, and so clear that one could see
the red of the stones at the bottom of it. SO it
had been at the birth of the world and so it had
remained ever since. Probably no human being had
ever broken that water with boat or with body.
Obeying some impulse, she determined to mar that

eternity of peace, and threw the largest pebble She
could find9 It struck and the ripples spread out

and out.

30

That vignette suggests both Rachel's defiance and her impo-
tence.

The sea, of course, can swallow them without a trace,
and the earth resists the efforts of the most determined
aggressors to civilize it; witness the fate of the English
colony in South America (this is, of course, English history
according to Virginia Woolf, and no doubt quite imaginary).

From the interior came Indians with subtle poisons,

naked bodies, and painted idols; from the sea came

vengeful Spaniards and rapacious Portuguese; exposed
to all these enemies (though the climate proved won-
derfully kind and the earth abundant) the English
dwindled away and all but disappeared. Somewhere
about the middle of the seventeenth century a single
leOp watched its season and slipped out at night,
bearing with it all that was left of the great Brit-

ish colony, a few men, a few women, and perhaps a

dozen dusky children. English history then denies
all knowledge of the place.

A mound of stones at the tOp of a mountain is the Occasion
for a disagreement among the picknickers as to whether it
is a cairn or the ruin of a watch-tower, so little power
have human monuments against the erosion of time.

In The Voygge Out, Woolf sketches her characters against
immense, inhuman backdrOps, not only against the bottomless
caverns of time, but, more tangibly, they appear as tiny
sillouettes against the mountains, the sea, the night. At
the beginning of chapter seven she contrasts their tiny
ship, the Euphrosyne, with the immensity of the ocean and
suggests the common interest that should bind humanity

together.

 

31

From a distance the Euphrosyne looked very small....
At night....the little ship shrunk to a few beads

of light out among the dark waves, and one high-in
air upon the mast-head seemed something mysterious
and impressive....She became a ship passing in the
night....an emblem of the loneliness of human life,
an occasion far queer confidences and sudden appeals

for sympathy.

Her human beings are uncomfortably and self-conscious-
ly puny little things, pathetically lost in a universe too
vast for them. The storm scene at the beginning of chapter
twenty-seven which Shows the humans as passive, frightened
Spectators huddling in their flimsy shelter is a striking
example of the narrator's perception of the human relation-
ship to nature.

The only way Rachel seems able to deal with the immen-
Sity of the world is to avert her eyes from it. The follow-
ing scene is comparable to one in TO The Lighthouse, when
Nancy turns from the vastneSs of the ocean to become the
god of a tideepool in the rocks. The difference, however,
as we shall see later, is that in To The Liggthouse the
human beings loom larger in the foreground; those in :92

Voyage Out often appear miniscule. Here, Rachel's visual

 

leap from the mountain range to an insect on a blade of
grass is an emotional retreat from macrocosm to microcosm.

She sat beside him looking at the mountains too.
When it became painful to look any longer, the
great size of the view seeming to enlarge her
eyes beyond their natural limit, she looked at
the ground; it pleased her to scrutinize this
inch of the soil of South America so minutely
that she noticed every grain of earth and made

32

it into a world where She was endowed with supreme

power. She bent a blade of grass, and set an in-

sect on it, and thought how strange it was that she

should have bent that tassel rather than any other

of the million tassels.22

It is worth noting that each time the characters in
The Voyage Out face a particularly empty stretch of horizon
or forbidding landscape, they come closer tOgether. More
accurately, they attempt to come closer together. They
seem to be reaching for each other as each would grasp at

a floating plank in a rolling ocean.

It is when Rachel and Terence are alone in the jungle
that they become engaged. The jungle itself, that parody
of Eden ('Beware of snakes!’), is extremely unpleasant, in
spite of its flowering verdure and butterflies. It is
stiflingly close: "the air came at them in languid puffs of
scent," and the couple manage to lose themselves in it.

The atmosphere is both oppressive and ominous.

As they passed into the depths of the forest the
light grew dimmer, and the noises of the ord1nary
world were replaced by those creaking and Signing
sounds that suggest to the traveler in a forest
that he is walking at the bottom of the sea. The
path narrowed and turned; it was hedged in by dense
creepers which knotted tree to tree, and burst here
and there into star-shaped crimson blossoms. The
sighing and creaking up above were broken every now
and then by the jarring cry of some startled

animal.2

The strongest reason for their union would seem to be their
shared sense of a profound and frightening loneliness, made

more acute by their austere and inhospitable surroundings.

33

Hewet, in this passage, feels himself helpless to direct
the course of events.
He felt as if he were waiting, as if he were sta:
tionary among things that passed over him and
around him, voices, peOple's bodies, birds....
He looked at her sometimes as if she must know
that they were waiting together, and being drawn
on together, without being able to offer any
resistance. Again he read from his book:

Whoever you are holding me now in your hand,
Without one thing all will be useless.

A bird gave a wild laugh, a monkey chuckled a mali-
cious question, and, as fire fades in the hot sun-
shine, his words flickered and went out.24
The passage Hewet is reading suggests a reasoned love,
love directed by intellect or will, and the implication of
the sentence following it is that here, reason and will are
helpless to direct the course of events.
Terence and Rachel are drawn together mostly by a
shared sense of loneliness, and Terence, at least, is suppos—
edly influenced by sexual passion. Woolf doesn't dwell on
that aspect of their relationship; she is content to say
"He was overcome with the desire to hold her in his arms."25
Perhaps this was due to her distrust and dislike of male
sexual passion in general, and she herself finds Terence a
likable, if vague, character. Certainly Woolf had extra~
ordinarily complex feelings about the role of sexual desire
in human relationships; while she was able to see such male—
female unions as the one between her parents, or Vanessa's,

or Stella's, as essentially healthful and good, and while

34

she herself lamented for many years her childlessness,
nevertheless she was mistrustful of the mere biological
urge for sex, especially on the part of the male. What
seemed to her particularly repugnant was the male desire
for domination and possessiveness.

AS late as The Waves, when she has made her peace with

 

nature, she still has Bernard remark on the "blind stupidity”
of nature that dictates a life devoted to reproduction. At
any rate, the idea that male sexual desire would be more the
result of cultural conditioning than biological inheritance
seems to be a develOpment of more recent psychology, and

it seems safe to say that Woolf would regard male desire as

a product of physiology.

Nature, in its aspect of lust, has been the reason
Rachel's life has been a half-life; since she has been
unable to explore her world freely, her development has
been severely stunted, and she rages against this crippling
of her growth.

'So that's why I can't walk alone!

By this new light she saw her life for the first

time a creeping hedged-in thing, driven cautiously

between high walls, here turned aside, there

plunged in darkness, made dull and crippled for—

ever-~her life that was the only chance she had-—

the short season between two silences.

When Rachel meets with loveless desire in the form Of
Richard Dalloway, the nightmare she suffers after that

encounter reveals that although her conscious self recoiled

in horror at being apprehended only as a physical object

35

by another human being. Helen's explanation is unsatisfac—
tory both to Rachel and to the reader.

'It's the most natural thing in the world. Men will

want to kiss you, just as they'll want to marry you.

The pity is to get things out of prOportion. It's

like noticing the noises peOple make when they eat,

or men Spitting; or, in short, any small thing that

gets on one's nerves.
Yet to Rachel it is not a ”small thing" to be treated as a
commodity; to have her personality and intelligence deni-
grated or patronized while her body is desired is horrible
because it utterly negates her humanity. Her reaction is to
consider male sexuality in itself as bestial; the "barbarian"
men who in her fantasies invade the ship stOp to "Shuffle"
at her door. That nightmare pursues her even in her final
delirium; the womb, which should be a center of joy and
generation, has become a dungeon where one encounters gib-
bering lust and demented tormentors. It is difficult to
escape the conclusion that at some profound level, Rachel
is unable to distinguish between sexuality that is selfish
and loveless, and sexuality that is combined with love and
caring. While Terence may not be an ideal mate, nor mar-
riage the "answer" for Rachel at this time in her life,
nevertheless his desire for her is quite obviously based
upon his total conception of her as an individual. She,
apparently, is threatened by the imminence Of the sexual

relationship and perhaps this saps her will to live when

the illness strikes.

36

The cause of her sickness is never specifically as-
cribed either to the trip or to Ambrose's supposed careless-
ness in the preparation of food. There is some Speculation,
but no accusation. Rachel's family and friends do not feel
rSSponsible for her death; as far as they are concerned, it
is nature's casual whim that destroys her, and since nature
is portrayed as overwhelmingly powerful in this story, the
reader is inclined to agree with them.

At the time Rachel falls ill, Terence reflects,

Helen's good sense seemed to.have much in common with

the good sense of nature, which avenged rashness by

a headache, 33d, like nature's good sense, might be

depended on.

Without dwelling on Woolf's tendency to irony, it seems
that her point might be that nature has no sense at all,

and that it is reckless anthrOpomorphism to ascribe kindly

feelings to the cosmos.

Chapter 2

Jacob's Room

Jacob's Room is a much brighter novel than The Voyage

 

923; a sense of peace and serenity pervades the story in
spite of the fact that the protagonist, like Rachel before
him, meets an early death. In her first novel, Woolf por—
trayed human beings who were out of touch with each other
and with nature, lost in an overwhelming, large, and awesome

universe. In Jacob's Room, human beings are a more potent

force than in the first novel.

In the first paragraph, we are intrOduced to a conscious-
ness Woolf names "Betty Flanders”; we see the world through
that consciousness and draw a sense of power from the mere
fact that when Mrs. Flanders' eyes fill with tears,

The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and
she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Conner's

little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the
sun.

Also,

Tears made all the dahlias in her garden undulate
in red waves and slashed the glass house in ger eyes,
and Spangled the kitchen with bright knives.

When Woolf describes the storm in Jacob's Room, she

 

employs terms similar to the ones she used in The Voyage

 

93$, but there the resemblance ends. The storm in Jacob's‘

37

38

Room, for all its wildness of wind, is less terrifying than
the one in The Voyage Out, for the purely impersonal force
is perceived as animate, rather than inanimate; it is per-

sonified as a wild beast. In Jacob's Room, the wind "raged

 

and gave a sudden wrench at the cheap fastenings."3 To
continue down the page,
...the wind was tearing across the coast, hurling
itself at the hills, and leaping, in sudden gusts,
on tOp of its own back....How the lights seemed to
wink and quiver in its fury....And rolling the dark
waves before it, it raced over the Atlantic, jerking
the stars above the ships this way and that.“
Not only is the storm described in different terms, but the
behavior of the humans is markedly different. Instead of
huddling, awestruck, at the window to watch the prOgress of
the storm, the two women hover protectively over the sleep—
ing children like birds spreading their wings over nestlings
in a downpour. The storm only heightens the sense of cozi-
ness in the little house. In this warm snuggery "the two
women murmured over the spirit lamp, plotting the eternal

conspiracy of hush and clean bottles while the wind raged.”5

A great many of the metaphors in Jacob's Room suggest

 

animals or humans. As the rain starts to fall in earnest,

The lodging-house seemed full of gurgling and rushing;
the cistern overflowed; water bubbling and squeaking
and running along the pipes and streaming down the
windows.6

When Mrs. Flanders is viewing the Scarborough harbour by
night,
The lights of Scarborough flashed, as if a woman

wearing a diamond necklace turned her head this way
and that.7

39

On the sailing trip to the Scilly Isles, Timmy and Jacob
are drawn against a seascape domesticated by the use of
homely metaphors.

By six o'clock a breeze blew in off an icefield; and
by seven the water was more purple than blue; and by
half-past seven there was a patch of rough gold-beater's
skin round the Scilly Isles, and Durant's face as he
sat steering, was of the colour of a red laquer box
polished for generations. By nine all the fire and
confusion had gone out of the sky, leaving wedges of
apple-green and pale yellow; and by ten the lanterns
on the boat were making twisted cOlours on the waves,
elongated or squat, as the waves humped or stretched
themselves. The beam from the lighthouse strode
rapidly across the water. Infinite millions of miles
away powdered stars twinkled; but the water slapped
the boat, and crashed, with rggular and appalling
solemnity, against the rocks.

Jacob's Room is not only different from The Voyage

 

923 in its treatment of nature as purely diverting and
beautiful; in this sense it differs also from the novels
that follow. Here, she places nature side by side with
humanity rather than distantly behind it or overwhelmingly
above it. Instead of scanning the distant and forbidding
horizon, she focuses on the brightness of petals, the color
glowing on a butterfly's wing. The emphasis is always on
beauty, on the feast of color nature spreads for the eye.
There is a sense here of the sea sharing with Betty
Flanders her apprehension Of the storm; there is also an
unforgettable sense of life, almost sentient life, in the

landscape.

The wind was rising. The waves showed that uneasi—
ness, like something alive, restive, expecting the
whip, of waves before a storm. The fishing-boats
-were leaning to the water's brim. A pale yellow

40

light shot across the purple sea; and shut. The
lighthouse was lit. 'Come along,’ said Betty
Flanders. The sun blazed in their faces and
glided the great blackberries trembling out from
the hedge.

The descriptions of nature start to quicken, brighten,

and breathe, in a way that they did not in The Voyage Out;

 

nature is loved and appreciated in a way it is not in her
first story. There, the descriptions of scenery rarely con—
tain anything really lively or beautiful. Occasionally
there was a glimpse of movement, but for the most part the

scenery was a series of "still lifes." In Jacob's Room,

 

we see not only much lovelier scenery, but also more original
descriptions. The atmosphere is light and gay, rather than
heavy or brooding. There is much more life and movement in
her imagery. There is not, however, the sense of flux, of
time racing away, that will come in To The Lighthouse.
There is only a quickening, a liveliness that conveys the
author's exquisite pleasure in nature without the almost
frightening sense of evanescence that runs through her
later works. Time is referred to, but gently.

The flamingo hours fluttered softly through

the sky. But regularly they dipped their

wings 1n pitch black.1
The description of the meadow at evening before the dinner-
Party is lovely, and full of soft movement; the scene is
rendered with great sensitivity and love, but is not other-

wise unconventional. The author does not yet see it slipping

away even as she watches. It is as if, for a time, the

41

artist was able to relax and enjoy the beauty before her
with joy, and without apprehension....the fanatic fire which

begins to burn in To The Lighthouse and leaps up in The Waves

 

 

has not yet started to blow, to consume her. Nature is a
source of reassurance and comfort, more so than in any other
book of Woolf's. After the ordeal of Sunday dinner with his
don, Jacob escapes with his friend into the May afternoon,
probably one of the loveliest in all English literature.

...he draws into him at every step as he walks by
the river such steady certainty, such reassurance
from all sides, the trees bowing, the grey spires
soft in the blue, voices blowing and seeming sus—
pended in the air, the spring air of May, the elas-
tic air with its particles--chestnut bloom, pollen,
whatever it is that gives the May air its potency,
blurring the trees, gumming the buds, daubing the
green, and the river runs past, not at flood, not
swiftly, but cloying the oar that dips in it and
drOps white drops from the blade, swimming green
and deep over the bowed rushes, as if lavishly
caressing them.11

From having been a vast, malevolent womb spewing forth catas—

trOphe and destruction, nature has become a sustenance and

delight.

This passage, after The Voyage Out, is almost startling

in its change of outlook.

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild
horse in us. To galIOp intemperately; fall on the
sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have--
positively—-a rush of friendship for stones and
grasses, as of humanity were over, and as for men
and women, let them go hang——there is no gett1ng
over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty

often.12
Compared with, "I don't like views; they're too inhuman,"

it sounds as if the author had come round to the Opposite

42

point of view. Certainly the war must have had a profound
effect on her estimate of the destructive capacities of the
human race.

There is even a suggestion of the pathetic fallacy in
the juxtaposition of this winter landscape with Jacob's
reverie as he muses on his lover's faithlessness.

...the furze bushes were black, and now and then

a black shiver crossed the snow as the wind drove

flurries of frozen particles before it.13

At this time in her life, if the author of Jacob's
Room saw nature as "other," it was obviously an ”other"
that she could appreciate and accept. She no longer felt
it to be alien, Opposed to her. This reconciliation with
”otherness” could very well be due to her husband's nurtur-
ance; he was the first male in her life who gave, rather
than demanded, attention, affection, care. After knowing
him, she could draw a distinction between males and patri-
archal culture; one did not necessarily follow from the
other.

While in The Voyage Out, Woolf's characters failed to
enjoy natural beauty and the narrator seemed to share their
point of view, now, in Jacob's Room, the characters once
again are frequently too preoccupied or insensitive to pay
attention to their surroundings, but Woolf no longer sympa-
thizes with that attitude. She finds them boorish or
unappreciative: ”The Stars bore me.” When Jacob and Timmy

Seem to be ignoring the beauty around them on their voyage

Woolf writes,

43

Why the right way to Open a tin of beef, with Shakes-
peare on board, under conditions of such splendour,
should have turned them to sulky schoolboys, none

can tell.1

She seems amused, but also to be gently chiding their petu-
lance. When Mrs. Flanders sits on the hill over Scarborough
harbour, she seems too preoccupied to notice her surroundings.

The entire gamut of the view's changes should have

been known to her; the winter aspect, spring, summer

and autumn; how storms came up from the swamp; how
the moors shuddered and brightened as the clouds

went over; she should have noted the red spot where

the villas were building; and the diamond flash of

little glass houses in the sun. Or, if details like
these escaped her, she might have let her fancy play
upon the gold tint of the sea at sunset, and thought
how it lapped in coins of gold upon the Shingle,
little pleasure boats shoved out into it; the black
arm of the pier hoarded it up. The whole city was
pink and gold—domed; mist-wreathed; resonant; stri-
dent. Tulips burnt in the sun.15
Woolf seems to imply that Mrs. Flanders was lacking in
sensitivity; if she is not judging her, she is at least
noting that her character was not taking advantage of the
solace proferred her.

An exception to this are Fanny Elmer's reflections the
day after she falls in love with Jacob. Her mood seems
incongruous with awakening passion. It has been suggested
that Woolf did not quite know how to portray that facet of
human experience and here, one suspects, she is giving us,
instead of passion for a human being, an awakening of pas—
sion for the world.

The body after long illness is languid, passive,

receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain
it. The tears well and fall as the dog barks in

44

the hollow, and the children skim after hoops,

the country darkens and brightens. Beyond a

veil it seems. Ah, but draw the veil thicker

lest I faint with sweetness, Fanny Elmer sighed.l6
This passage describes very well the sensations of someone
recovering from a period of invalidism; Woolf must have
experienced it very powerfully more than once. It does
not, however, convey a sense of what the world seems like
to someone falling in love with another human being. It is
out of place in the novel, but it is a clue to Woolf's love
affair with the world. The ecstatic pleasure in natural
beauty is doubtless due to having been so long deprived of
the ability to take delight in ordinary things. Her illness,
her long struggle with darkness, seems to have left her
permanently and passionately in love with daylight.

Her terrible descent into madness and her subsequent
re-emergence into sanity may also be a reason why she no
longer envies the inanimate, unconscious universe its
longevity. Life without consciousness has no value for
her; henceforth, she will evaluate human experience only in
human terms. The characters in Jacob's Room do not measure
their stature against the universe, but against the Skylines
of Scarborough, Cambridge, London. She does not dwell on
the universe without its human spectators.

Jacob's visit to Greece would have been an ideal occa-
sion for Woolf to make some comment on the distant views...

how they outlast the beholder, etc., but she doesn't. In—

stead, we get this: "...the Parthenon appears...likely to

45

outlast the entire world.”

...the Parthenon is separate from all that; and if
you begin to consider how it had stood out all night,
for centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at
midday the glare is dazzling and the frieze almost
invisible) with the idea that perhaps it is beauty
alone that is immortal.

Whereas in The Voyage Out, Woolf found human construc-
tions and dwellings rather inadequate (the house looked
like a ”gazebo"; the hotel seemed inadequate protection
against the storm), she celebrates human creation in Jacob's
Room, whether it is civilization or merely its effects:
”The grey church spires received them; the hoary city, old,
Sinful, and majestic." Her comparison of St. Paul's
cathedral with a snail's shell implies that she saw the
activity of architecture quite as "natural" to man as the
activity of any creature making a home for itself.

....if there is such a thing as a shell secreted

by man to fit man himself here we find it, on the

banks of the Thames, where the great streets join

and St. Paul's Cathedral, like the volute on the

tOp of the snail shell, finishes it off. 9
Altogether, one has the impression that Woolf found human
constructions stronger, more beautiful, and more adequate
shelter than she did when she was younger.

Fanny Elmer hears a thrush singing and it does not
seem to her a ”wild laugh” nor a ”senseless cry"; she is
projecting, of course, as did Terence and Rachel when they

listened to bird-song, but the song is heard as empathetic,

rather than antipathetic. Moreover, it is illuminating

46

that Woolf balances the sound of the humming wheels with
the rushing wind.

NOW, among the trees, it was the thrush trilling
out into the warm air a flutter of jubiliation,
but fear seemed to spur him, Fanny thought; as if
he were anxious with such joy at his heart...as
if he were watched as he sang, and pressed by
tumult to sing. There! Restless, he flew to the
next tree. She heard his song more faintly.
Beyond it was the humming of the wheels and the
wind rushing.20

The projection of a very human fear onto the bird seems a
Woolfian sense of the evanescence of joy, the danger inherent
in experiencing joy...but one which, nevertheless, she is
going to let herself experience.

In chapter 11, Woolf takes us on another of her time-
journeys, but not back to the dawn of creation. She takes
us back to the Roman camp. (True, there was human history
in England before the coming of the Romans, but English
civilization as we know it started when they sailed up the
Thames, and civilization has a special significance for
Woolf in this story.) In fact, the moors, habited by human
ghosts, seem only a backdrOp for human history.

Did the bones stir, or the rusty swords? Was Mrs.

Flanders' two-penny-half—penny brooch forever part

of the rich accumulation? And if all the ghosts

flocked thick and rubbed shoulders with Mrs. Flanders

in a circle, would she not have seemed perfectly in
her place, a live English matron, growing stout?

The clock struck the quarter. The frail waves of

sound broke among the still gorse and hawthorne

twigs as the church clock divided time into quarters.

Motionless and broad-backed the moors received the

statement 'It is fifteen minutes past the hour,’
but made no answer unless a bramble stirred.

47

Yet even in this light the legends on the tombstones
could be read, brief voices saying, 'I am Berta
Ruck,’ 'I am Tbm Gage.’ And they say which day of
the year they died, and the New Testament says some-
thing for them, very proud, very emphatic or con—

soling.
The moors accept all that, too.21

The human element is most important here. The moors accept

human ghosts, memories, voices....their indifference is not

stressed. Woolf goes on,

Often, even at night, the church seems full of
people...It is a ship with all its crew aboard.
The timbers strain to hold the dead and the
living....Their tongues join together in syl-
labling the sharp-cut words, which forever slice
asunder time and the broad-backed moors. 2

That "ship with all its crew aboard" strains because figura—
the dead weigh more than the

tively as well as literally,

living....all civilization is carried in that metaphor. In

The Voyage Out, Woolf saw only the fragility of the indivi-

 

dual life and disregarded the strange human power to speak

from beyond the grave. But now, what a difference from

Forster! Here, says Woolf, we do make a difference, if only

to each other. And, if we are the only consciousness in the

universe, what else can matter, after all? Human tongues

"slice asunder time and the broad-backed moors," humans and

human concerns have shouldered their way to the forefront;

they are no longer puny, frightened ants scurrying on the

hill of the cosmos.

For Woolf, as for many others, the supreme achievement

of civilization is the university, which has (ideally) as

48

its only purpose the nurturance of culture and intellect.

In The Voyage Out, the jungle night completely nullified

the human beings lost in it; in Jacob's Room Woolf considers

the effect of Cambridge upon the night.

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travelers,
the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort
from the thought, and no doubt if you are of a mys-
tical tendency, consolation, and even explanation,
shower down from the unbroken surface. But above
Cambridge-—anyhow above the roof of King's College
Chapel-~there is a difference. Out at sea a great
city will cast a brightness into the night. Is it
fanciful to suppose the sky, washed into the crevices

of King's College Chapel, lighter, thinner, more
sparkling than the sky elsewhere? Does Cambridge

burn not only into the night, but into the day?23
The phrase "if you are of a mystical tendency" gently dis—

misses any need to see more into nature than is there already.

It ia, and it is lovely, and that is enough. To Woolf, its

beauty is consolation and solace to human grief. At the

end, she contrasts its glory and serenity with the orga-

nized stupidity and busy ignorance that is war and war-

mongering. Immediately after we are shown the heads of

state signing papers to mobilize the country, she gives us

a sunset .

'Such a sunset,’ wrote Mrs. Flanders in her letter
to Archer at Singapore. 'One couldn't make up one's
mind to come indoors,’ she wrote. 'It seemed wicked

to waste even a moment.'
First of all, one must note that Mrs. Flanders seems to have

increased in wisdom over the years. Secondly, the message

implicit throughout the book and explicit here, is that it

is folly to ignore the beauty around us. As Jacob diSappears

into the "firey rose” of the sunset over the Serpentine, he

49

is probably on his way to set his affairs in order before

he goes off to war. Had he chosen instead to ignore the

call of "patriotic duty," he might have lived to see more of

them.

 

Chapter 3

Mrs. Dalloway

In The Voyage Out, there seemed to be not only a sharp

division between nature and humanity, but both worlds were
unpleasant; the human world appeared sterile and the natural

world appeared ominous. In Jacob's Room, the natural world

was depicted as bright and glowing with sunshine and color,
but the line of demarcation between nature and human con—
sciousness remained, with the human world remaining super-
ficial.

x/In Mrs. Dalloway, nature and human consciousness are

interwoven in~a way that they had not been”in The-Voyage

 

Out andeJacob!s_Room. Clarissa speaks of "that leaf-encum—

bered forest, the soul," and this is the first instance of

the author using an image from nature as a metaphor for

human consciousness. Nature is no longer something observed

from without, either as a supra~human and desolate backdrop,

or as a cozy and sustaining garden, but as an integral and

subjective part of the individual human mind. There is no

longer a sharp division between the internal and external

worlds.

And the leaves being connected by millions of fibers
with his own body, there on seat, fanned it up and
down; when the branch stretched, he, too, made that

statement.1
50

51

And here:
His body was macerated until only the nerve fibers
were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock...
the earth thrilled beneath him, red flowers grew
through his flesh; their still leaves rustled by
his head.
One of the most arresting differences is this use of
natural imagery to describe not only her characters' fleet-
ing moods and impressions, but her characters themselves

in a non-derogatory manner. As‘I note The Voyage Out, the

 

characters were compared again/and again to animals, but
//

, / ./
never in any but a bitterror diSparaging way.‘ In Mrs.

Dalloway, they become green fields, birds perched on boughs,
water—lilies, filaments of spider—web.

....her look....rose....as a3bird touches a branch
and rises and flutters away.

She was like a bird sheltering under the thin
hollow of a leaf, who blinks at the sun when
the leaf moves; starts at the crack of a dry
twig.

....she was....drowsy and heavy, like a field of
clover in the sunshine this hot June day, with
the bees goigg round and about and the yellow
butterflies.

....she had become very serious like a hyacinth
sheathed in glossy green, with bgds, just tinted,
a hyacinth which had had no sun.

....for the shock of Lady Bruxton asking Richard
to lunch without her made the moment in which she
stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels of
the shock of a passing oar and shivers: so She
rocked: so she shivered.

And they went further and further from her, being
attached to her by a thin thread...which would
stretch and stretch...as a single spider's web

is blgtted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags
down.

52

There is a paradox here, for while human beings inter-
mingle with nature in this novel because of Woolf's choice
of similes, they are more responsive to their inner land-
scapes than to their surroundings (in fact, this novel is
the first in which Woolf's characters gaye inner land-
scapes).

At mid-day, on Clarissa's drawing-room couch, Peter
Walsh suddenly feels,

....his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at
from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the
sunken day.9

When Peter Walsh, overcome, starts to cry,

....Clarissa had...taken his hand...kissed him,
actually had felt his face on hers before she
could down the brandishing of Silver-flashing
plumes like Bampas grass in a tropic gale in
her breast.1

Richard Dalloway, in the midst of London's noon-time traffic,
can slip away:

The speed of the morning traffic slackened, and
single carts rattled carelessly down half-empty
streets. In NOrfolk, of which Richard Dalloway
was half thinking, a softwarm wind blew back the
petals; confused the waters; ruffled the flower-
ing grasses. Haymakers, who had pitched beneath
hedges to sleep away the morning toil, parted
curtains of green blades; moved trembling globes
of cow parsley to see the sky; the blue, the
steadfast, the blazing summer sky.

The internal, subjective world is the only one that matters;
sunshine cannot penetrate the night of the soul.

She began to go slowly upstairs...as if she had
left a party...and stood alone, a single figure
against the appalling night or rather, to be
accurate, against the stare of this matter-of-
fact June morning° soft with the glow of rose
petals for some. i

53

Clarissa, behind closed lids, watches flowers unfold,
or feels seas parting in the depths of her soul.

....moments like this are buds on the tree of life,
flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if
some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only).13

....an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a
diver before plunging while the sea darkens and
brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten
to break, but only gently split their surface, roll
and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the
weeds with pearl.1

Septimus notes that ”under certain atmOSpheric condi-
tions" the human voice can ”quicken trees into life.” The
green folds Of Clarissa's dress, as she gathers and sews
them, become waves that, rising and falling, soothe her
senses and carry her away from the agitated shores of human
contact.

One of the most striking instances of the personifica-
£323 of nature (and a very dramatic example of the ability
of the human mind to project onto nature feelings which have
their origin in human relationships) is Peter Walsh's dream.

She seemed...like one of those spectral presences
which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and
branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of lanes,
plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure

at the end of the ride. By conviction an atheist
perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of
extraordinary exaltation. Nothing exists outside

us except a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for
solace, for relief, for something outside these
miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these
craven menwand women. But if he can conceive of her,
then in some sort she exists, he thinks, and advanc-
ing down the path with his eyes upon sky and branches
he rapidly endows them with womanhood; sees with
amazement how grave they become; how majestically,

as the breeze stirs them, they dispense with a dark

54

flutter of the leaves charity, comprehension, abso-
lution, and then flinging themselves aloft, confound
the piety of their aspect with a wild carouse. Such
are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace
beside, put their faces in front of, the actual

thing; often overpowering the solitary traveller

and taking away from him the sense of the earth,

the wish to return, and giving him for substitute

a general peace, as if (so he thinks as he advances
down the forest ride) all this fever of living were
simplicity itself; and myriads of things merges in
one thing; and 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 compassion, comprehen-
sion, absolution. So, he thinks, may I never go

back to the lamplight; ....rather let me walk straight
on this great figure, who will, with a toss of her
head, mount me on her streaeers and let me blow to
nothingness with the rest.

Not only is this dreamer-traveller Peter Walsh, it is
also Virginia Woolf. There is reason to believe that she
very much wanted and needed'bompassion, charity, comprehen-
sion and absolutiod'from her mother. Leonard Woolf in

Beginning Again, writes that his wife, in the depths of her

 

madness, apparently felt herself guilty of some sin. Since
her mother died when Virginia was just starting adolescence,
Virginia had almost certainly felt some jealousy and rivalry
with her mother prior to the time of her death. In addition,
she may not have had enough of her mother's attention and
love to reassure her. It is easy to suppose that She was
somewhat overshadowed by her more robust, outgoing elder
brother and sister (Thoby and Vanessa) and by the youngest,
Adrian, whom she later described as her mother's favorite.
Add to this the fact that she also had two elder half-

brothers and a half-sister as well as a father who was almost

55

an egomaniac in his demands for her mother's attention, and
it is not hard to imagine that Virginia got lost in the
family shuffle, or that she was able to command enough
attention to nourish her. Assuming that her mother was
scrupulously fair in parceling out her affection, the fact
remains that one of Virginia's perception and sensibility
no doubt required much more love and reassurance than most
children need.

Leonard's care for Virginia was maternal; while she
always sought love and nurturance from women (Violet Dicken—
son, her sisters, Stella and Vanessa) she was able to accept
it from Leonard, and this assuaged her need to a great ex—
tent, yet she was always, half—playfully, half-seriously,
asking for reassurances and demonstrations of affection
from her female friends, and from Vanessa. But the person
who provided most of the affection and support she so badly
needed was her husband, and it was a healing balm for her
madness.

Another aspect of Woolf's changing relationship to the
natural world is her growing concern--one almost writes
obsession-~with time. And for Clarissa, as for Woolf, time
becomes the implacable enemy. In Mrs. Dalloway, time is
leaden, heavy, inconsiderate...its summons ”irrevocable."
The tolling of the hour at regular intervals throughout the
book brings us again and again to an awareness that time is
slipping away, even as the characters attempt to arrest its

flow, or turn it back.

56

Clarissa, wisely, wants to savour the life left to
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 remained
almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop,
Clarissa...plunged into the very heart of the moment,
transfixed it, there-~the moment of this June morning
on which was the pressure of all the other mornings. 5
She alternates between an almost ecstatic awareness of
life, of beauty around her, and a chilling despair. When
she discovers that her husband has been invited to Lady
Bruton's for lunch, and that she is not, she is jealous,
not of his being with another woman, but of those people
young enough to look forward to a whole life-time of social
gatherings.
....she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton's
face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive Stone,
the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was
sliced; how little the margin that remained was capau
ble any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in
youthful years, the colours, salts, tones, of exis-
tence... 7
Clarissa has denied part of her ”nature"; She has
denied her sexual being. She has been a wife and a mother
without really feeling sexual pleasure in it. She yearns
for a capacity to embrace and enjoy the sensuousness of
physical beauty, and to some extent she does, but it seems
to be more tantalizing than fulfilling.
There were roses; there were irises. Ah yes--so she
breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell...among the
irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her

eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street up-
roar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness

57

....how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry
laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and
prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and
all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged
violet, snow white, pale-—as if it were evening and
girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas
and roses after the superb summer's day, with its
almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carna-
tions, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment
between six and seven when every flower-~roses, carna-
tions, irises, lilac—~glows; white, violet, red, deep
orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly,
purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the moths
spinning in and outs over the cherry pie, over the
evening primroses!1
The longing to be satisfied by this beauty is here partly a
longing for youth, "girls in muslin frocks," and partly a
longing for her own passing beauty; her attitude before the
flowers is sensuousness that won't let itself be sensual.
She is aware of the need for physical solace; hence her
responsiveness to beauty, but she has isolated herself from
her own body in that she will not let herself feel sexual
pleasure.
The first line from a mock-dirge in ”Cymbeline,"
"Fear no more the heat '0 the sun” which runs all day
through Clarissa's head, suggests not only that her joy
in life is not dead, but merely sleeping, but also that
she no longer needs to fear the fierceness and possessive-
ness of sexual love and its power to ensnare the individual
life in its meshes of lust, fertility, breeding...the toils
that confine and finally strangle the free human spirit.
That fear of losing herself has kept her from giving her-

self to her husband in any real sense; always emotionally

58

virginal, she prefers to sleep alone after her illness.

But she regrets her isolation. As she goes up the stair

to her room, she reflects that this "matter-of-fact June
morning” is ”soft with the glow of rose petals for some"

but that she herself feels "suddenly shrivelled, aged,
breastlessr"19 She is compared by the author to a nun,

as she enters her attic room where ”There was an emptiness
about the heart of life." This is an acknowledgement that
she is not, in her inmost retreat, able to feel that beauty
and liveliness which she tries to capture or create around
her. "Narrower and narrower would be her bed.”2°~~This image
of death, coming hard on the heels of the nun, makes explicit
her fear that she will die without having fully experienced

life.

Chapter 4

To The Lighthouse

Once again, in To The Lighthouse, Woolf sets her charac-

ters' brief lives against the chaos and flux of the natural

universe, but unlike the author of The Voyage Out, she per-
ceives that their importance lies in their perception and

understanding,

in their consciousness and courage. The

characters compare their lives to that nature which will "out-

last Shakespeare," but although they are even more aware

of their ephemerality measured against the span of the natural

world, they do not love it less, but more. Instead of the

"broodingness" of The Voyage Out, there is, in To The Light—

 

house, a quicksilver quality in the descriptions of scenery.
There is a sense of great delight taken in its beauty, and

not only delight, but ecstasy, in spite of its indifference
to our fate.

The alienation Woolf felt in her youth, alienation both
from nature and from human beings, had been alleviated by the

time she came to write Jacob's ROOm, and the landscape of her

imagination had started to flower. In Mrs. Dalloway, nature
and human consciousness are interwoven. In To The Lighthouse,

Woolf Shows nature as an austere and noble backdrop for

59

60

human drama, but there is again a yearning for recognition,

some Sign from nature that it acknowledges our presence, if

not our importance. But though her characters are moved to

awe by the vastness of their world, they do not love it

less. Here, Mrs. Ramsay surveys the view "that her husband

loved."

...but here, the houses falling away on both sides,
...the whole bay spread before the....For the
great plateful of blud water was before her; the
hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst;
and on the right, as far as the eye could see,
fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green
sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them,
which always seemed to be runninglaway into some
moon country, uninhabited of men.

Mrs. Ramsay and the author are sharing a common emotion

here; they notice the same things. Mrs. Ramsay is as con—

cerned with the passage of time as is Virginia Woolf, and

as delighted with the beauty of the earth. The love they

feel for it is apparent in the sense of urgency conveyed by
the use of gerunds for adjectives: "falling,” "fading,"
"flowing," ”running"...to most observers the landscape is

motionless; we do not notice the earth as it stretches and

groans in its sleep. Our short lives are set at such a

rapid pace that we cannot perceive the hills slowly shrug
their shoulders and settle, with a sigh too deep for human
ears to hear, into the sea.

In the first section of the novel, indeed, there is no
ambivalence expressed towards nature; it is celebrated and

loved, and the author reaches out to the world she sees

61

fleeting, sliding away from under her.

As Woolf approached middle-age, she felt her world

rushing away. "And death-~as I always feel--hurrying near.

43: how many more books?"2 This is taken from A Writer's

Diary; it is dated Tuesday, December 7th, 1925...almost mid-

way through To The Lighthouse. From her point of view, the

earth is spinning more rapidly...the days and nights slip

by more quickly than ever before, the seasons circle relent—

lessly, relentlessly closing in...and always there is the

sense that life is slipping away, that time is eroding our

precarious foothold on life.

There is always the sense of change; flowers are re-

ferred to as "burning," or as "red-hot pokers." Even still

scenes, like this dawn, "....a faint green quickens, like

a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave,"3

or this night,
"....in the light of harvest moons...which mellows the energy

of labour...smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping

blue to the shore,"4 contain movement. In Woolf's eyes, the

phenomena of nature seem to surge and fall, to take fire and

become ashes.

Woolf attempts to capture the moment in all its fluidity,

as it fixes itself upon or invades a consciousness. Her prose

works as a clear rippling of thought over a moment to magnify
it, to bring out its color, as a crystal stream brings out
the clarity and color of the pebbles Sparkling beneath its

water. In contrast to her early scenes, which seem fixed

62

and unchanging,

these especially are fluid, becoming; she'

attempts to capture motion itself.

An exception to this would be the passage describing

the dinner party that starts on page 157.

Just now...she had reached security; she hovered
like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an
element of joy...it arose, she thought, looking at
them all...from husband and children and friends;
all of which rising in this profound stillness...
seemed now for no special reason to stay there like
a smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them
safe together. It partook...of eternity...there

is a coherence in things, a stability...something
is immune from change, and shines out...in the face

of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a
ruby.

The entire passage (which is central to Mrs. Ramsay's exper-

ience of the dinner party) continues on to page 161 and ends

with the same phrase, "she hung suspended." The impression

rendered by the passage can be described in one of Woolf's

descriptions of Mrs. Ramsay's "internal landscapes.”

....like a light stealing under water so that its
ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing

themselves, and the sudden silent trout all lit up
hanging, trembling.

This is the first passage where the imagery (from Mrs. Ram-

say's point of view) suggests stillness. This conveys almost

subliminally to the reader a sense that for Mrs. Ramsay the

moment stands "out of time."

Even this moment, however, has not reached stasis, just

stillness. The words, "hovered," "balancing,” "trembling,"
imply that the moment is not caught, but hovering poised in

mid-air, and ready to slide down the sky in a flash.

63

In Mrs. Dalloway one is struck by the sensations Septi-
mus has of feeling himself to be mingled physically with
natural phenomena (the flowers grow through him, the heat
makes him feel as if he were macerated on a rock). Now both
Lily Briscoe and William Bankes feel the scene before them

as well as see it.

....the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue,
and the heart expanded with it and the body swam,
only the next instant to be checked and chilled by
the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. Then,
up behind the great black rock, almost every evening
spurted irregularly, so that one had to watch for

it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain

of white water; and then while one waited for that,
one watched, on the pale semicircular beach, wave
after wave shedding again7and again smoothly, a

film of mother of pearl.

A plate of fruit on her dinner table seems to Mrs. Ramsay

to be

....possessed of great size and depth, was like a
world in which one could take one's staff and climb
hills...and go down into valleys, and to her pleasure
(for it brought them into sympathy momentarily)

she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the
same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom
there, a tas§e1 here, and returned, after feasting,
to his hive.

This sensuousness of sight, the ability to be transported
to another level of consciousness by the ecstasy of seeing
something beautiful, is not Shared by all the characters in
To The Lighthouse, but is reserved to those with whom
Woolf shared important perceptions. They, like Septimus
before them, are transported by natural beauty, but unlike

Septimus, who had only a nightmare version of humanity, they

64

are better defended; they have a more complete and generous
vision of humanity; i.e., Mrs. Ramsay perceives Augustus as
a furry bee gathering beauty as nectar and storing it as
honey, in his heart; and they are therefore able to let them—
selves be Open and vulnerable to the world around them
without incurring serious danger.

The second part of the novel, ”Time Passes,” seems a
long sleep, and the figures in it, the shadows of a dream.
From Mr. Carmichel's extinguishing his candle to Lily Bris-
coe's awakening bolt upright in bed, we hear no voice but
the faceless narrator's, and see nothing but in a mirror,
dimly.

In "Time Passes," we sense some of the disappointment

in nature returning; we hear an echo from The Voyage Out

 

that nature isn't all it ought to be, that it should pro-
vide comprehensible answers to human questions. The narra-
tor of the ”Time Passes” section is chronicling the develop-
ment of young Virginia Stephen's own feelings towards the
world over a period which lasted about ten years, an era
that started with her mother's death, then her half-sister's,
and finally her brother's.

As she retraces her tragic past, Woolf is recalled to
her earlier feelings toward nature, but she is aware of
them and in control of them. She wishes the reader to share
in her sense of bitterness and anger and succeeds in con-

veying this sense by her use Of irony. In The Voyage Out,

 

65

the author's somewhat morbid fear of nature was implicit in
her choice of metaphor and simile; here it is explicit. The
completely impersonal forces are personified as casual,

disinterested busy-bodies who "bend over the bed,"9 have

"feather-light fingers,"10 who "....look....fold their gar-

ments....and disappear.”11 There is sadness, of course,

as well as irony.

....the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed
around bedroom doors. But here, surely, they must
cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear, what
lies here is steadfast. Here one might say to those
sliding lights, those fumbling airs that breathe and
bend over thezbed itself, here you can neither touch
nor destroy.

Night, darkness, the wind and the seasons, garbed by her
imagination with human form and inhuman purpose, transform
the Ramsays and their surroundings--quietly, relentlessly.
Once one has begun to comprehend that the never-ending
round of the seasons brings not only maturity and the
fruition of our pleasures, but also aging and death, they
are no longer seen as completely welcome in their changing
cycles.
But what after all is one night? A short space,
especially when the darkness dies so soon, and so
soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green
quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the
wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The win-
ter holds a pack of them in store and deals igem
equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers.
”Winter" here holds all the cards, as patient and cruel as
Death at his chessboard in Bergman's "Seventh Seal." When

the end of life has been perceived, sharply and vividly,

Spring can be a bitter mockery of human mortality, and the

66

cycle of the seasons becomes a grisly dance of death!

Our lives are played out to the rhythm of the seasons;
our moods find an allegory in the tranquillity of a summer
dawn or in the rage of autumn storms, but the parallel is
a hollow mockery of our need to find an Observer of the human
predicament. When Mrs. Ramsay dies, the narrator writes,

....should any sleeper fancying that he might find
on the beach an answer to his doubts, a Sharer of
his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down
by himself to walk on the sand, no image with sem—
blance of serving and divind promptitude comes readily
to hand bringing the night to order and making the
world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand
dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear.
Almost it would appear that it is useless in that
confusion to ask the night those questions as to
what, and why, and wherefore, WE4Ch tempt the sleeper
from his bed to seek an answer.

When she writes of "divine goodness" first seeming to be
moved by human penitence and toil, then changing its mind,
her "alas" sounds rather bitterly sarcastic.

It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and
all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain
and displayed behind it, Single, distinct, the hare
erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking, which,
did we deserve them, should be ours always. But
alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the
curtain; it does not please him; he covers his
treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them,
so confuses them that it seems impossible that their
calm should ever return....for our penigence deserves
a glimpse only, our toil respite only.

She has taken Christian rhetoric and made it sound very
shabby, indeed. She grants that "the mystic, and visionary"

can find some answer that warms them, but adds, "they could

not say what it was."

67

When Prue Ramsay is married and life seems to be taking
on an aspect of reason and order and happiness, then nature
seems to reflect this.

....softened and acquiescent, the spring with her

bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloak about

her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among

passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed

to have takeg upon her a knowledge of the sorrows

of mankind.

With the advent of the war, however, and the death of
Andrew Ramsay, things fall apart, nothing makes sense, and
the universe seems to be "battling and tumbling, in brute
confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself."17 And the
peace of the spring and daylight seem only senseless, as if
flowers blossoming no longer reflected any feelings of happi-
ness or celebration, but were the evidence only of nature's
blind urge to reproduce itself. The winds sift dust through
the Ramsays' home, spread weeds in their garden, and sow
flowers that Woolf describes as "standing there, looking
before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and
so terrible."18 The "eyelessness" Of the flowers is an
acknowledgement that nature has no faculties to perceive us
....and that seems "terrible." The descriptions of the wind,
the night, the marauding briars and weeds all combine to
give the impression that the unfeeling world is waiting to
swallow us up into oblivion.

While Woolf has nearly always treated the notion that

nature is beneficent with some degree of mockery, as she

does here:

68

....the white earth itself seemed to declare (but
if questioned at once to withdraw) thatlgood tri—
umphs, happiness prevails, order rules.

She becomes even more biting in this passage:

At that season those who had gone down to pace the
beach and ask of the sea and sky what message they
reported or what vision they affirmed had to consider
among the usual tokens of divine bounty--the sunset
on the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moon rising...
something out of harmony with this jocundity and this
serenity. There was the silent apparition of an
ashen-coloured ship for instance, come, gone; there
was a purplish stain as if something had boiled and
bled, invisibly, beneath. This intrusion into a
scene calculated to stir the most sublime reflections
and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed
their pacing. It was difficult blandly to overlook
them; to abolish their significance in the landscape;
to continue, as one walked by the sea, to marvel how
beauty outside mirrored beauty within.

Did nature supplement what man advanced? Did she
complete what he began? With equal complacencgoshe
saw his misery, his meanness, and his torture.

The mockery, the sarcasm are an indication of the bitterness
She felt in her youth, and feels again when she must plunge
into her past to create her story. Here, there are indica-
tions that she felt nature to have an intelligence. "With

equal complacence she saw..." In some of her other

 

writings Woolf had suggested that nature is not only indif-
ferent, but cruelly indifferent. In her essay, "On Being
Ill," She has this to say about the natural world:
Divinely beautiful it is also divinely heartless....
If we were all laid prone, stiff, still the skglwould
be experimenting with its blues and its golds.
In the same essay, she continues:
It is only the recumbent who know what, after all,
Nature is at no pains to conceal--that She in the

end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff
with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves about

69

the fields; ice will lie thig§ upon factory and

engine; the sun w111 go out.
Nature is a "heartless experimenter," a "conqueror” who is
”at no pains to conceal" the fact. While the references to
nature in the first and third sections stress its beauty, or
its mere indifference, the references to it in the second sec-
tion suggest she may have been battling, in her youth, an
almost paranoid perception of human isolation, of human soli-
tude caught in a struggle with forces which, in the words
of Henry David Thoreau, "are not bound to be kind to man."
And yet, it seems that the anger here is not directed so
much at nature so much as at those human beings whose compla-
cent anthrocentrism has painted a picture of the universe
with man and his concerns at the center, and all observable
phenomena as correSponding to the workings of a beneficent
providence. The night does not reflect "the compass of the
soul"....we can but reflect a little of the night. In "Time
Passes," Woolf says of nature that her beauty is not truth,
whatever else it may be.

In the third section of the novel, ”The Lighthouse,"
Lily has her vision, and Woolf has a reconciliation with the
shades of her mother and father.

This landscape, seen through Lily's eyes, is the first

one since The Voyage Out where the motion is suspended, and

 

time seems to be holding its breath.

70

All was silence. Nobody seemed yet to be stirring
in the house. She looked at it there sleeping in
the early sunlight with its windows green and blue
with the reflected leaves. The faint thought she
was thinking of Mrs. Ramsay seemed in consonance with
this quiet house; this smoke; this fine early morning
air. Fagnt and unreal, it was amazingly pure and ex-
citing.

Unlike the scenery in The Voyage Out, these "still lifes”

 

are lovely. Looking towards the lighthouse, Lily sees,

"The sea without a stain on it....The sea stretched like
silk across the bay."24 Whereas before, solid things like
hills and trees and rocks occasionally seemed fluid as water,
now, Lily,

....looked at the bay beneath her, making hillocks
of the blue bars of the waves, and stony fields of
the purpler Spaces... SO fine was the morning except
for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and
the sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck
high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down
into the sea. A steamer far out at sea had drawn in
the air a great scroll of smoke which stayed there
curving and circling decoratively, as if the air
were a fine gauze which held things and kept them
softly in itszgesh, only gently swaying them this
way and that.

The past and the present are caught in this soft morning
air and slide, almost imperceptibly, one into the other.
Lily, working on a problem in her painting, recalls a happy
hour spent with Mrs. Ramsay, one that stayed with her and
affected her "almost like a work of art." Lily recalls
having,

....rammed a little hole in the sand and covered it

up, by way of burying the perfection of the moment.

It was like a drop of silver in which one dipped and
illumined the darkness of the past.

71

This peaceful hush gives Lily the opportunity to slip out
of time and re-enter a place where she could feel the peace
she had felt when Mrs. Ramsay sat silent beside her, looking
out to sea.

....Lily, painting steadily, felt as if a door had

Opened, and one went in a high cathedral-like place,

very dark, very solemn. Shouts came from a world

far away. Sgeamers vanished in stalks of smoke on

the horizon. 7
For Lily, the little boat sailing towards the lighthouse with
the Ramsays on board seems gradually to evaporate on the
horizon until all that is left is her idea of them. For
their part, the Ramsays (Cam and James) come to disbelieve
in the shore. Woolf moves the reader from the shore to
the boat and back again, repeatedly; the center of "reality”
fluctuates between Lily's perspective and the Ramsays'.

For Lily, the sea is ”so soft that the sails and clouds
seemed set in its blue," and for Cam,

The sea was more important now than the shore.

Waves were all around them, tossing and sinking, with

a log wallowing down one wave, a gull riding on

another.

In The Voyage Out, there was a discrepancy between what
the characters hoped or imagined nature to be, and what their
author believed nature to be. Here, in "The Lighthouse,"
Woolf asserts the primacy of the subjective imagination.

She points out the mutability of ”reality"; how it changes
not only from one individual to another, and from moment to

moment, but also how there can be two versions of that

reality simultaneously.

72

James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the
white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight;
he could see that it was barred with black and white;
he could see windows in it; he could see washing
spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Light—
house, was it?

No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing
was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true,
too.

Moreover, the perceptor, in the act of perceiving, not only
understands some truth, but makes it real....if she can
communicate it, as Lily struggles here, first to perceive,
and then to make real, her vision.

What was the problem then? She must try to get

hold of something that evaded her. It evaded her
when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her now
when she thought of her picture. Phrases came.
Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases.
But what she wished to get hold of was that jar on
the nerves, the thing itself before it has been

made anything....lt was a miserable machine, an inef—
ficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for
painting or feeling; it always broke down at the
critical moment; heroically, one must force it on...
There was the hedge, sure enough. But one got nothing
by soliciting urgently. One only got a glare in the
eye from looking at the line in the wall, or from
rhinking-—she wore a grey hat.

The last sentence here reveals that the author believes
that reality cannot be known apart from its discoverer, or
known by accepting others' ideas. This struggle of Lily's
to hold on to her ”shock" (as Woolf terms such insights)
differs subtly from the struggle she had ten years earlier
on the Ramsays' lawn. Then, it seemed that others' versions
of reality intimidated her, stood between her and her vision,
...demons set on her who often brought her to the
verge of tears and made this passage from conception

to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a
child. Such she often felt herself-~struggling against

73

terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say 'But
this is what I see; this is what I see,’ and so to
clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her
breast, which a thousand forces did their best to
pluck away from her.31

After ten years have passed, Lily seems to feel that she has
the right to her reality, to her interpretation of it:
"Mother and child then--objects of universal veneration--
might be reduced...to a purple shadow without irreverence."32
For the artist, this is a triumph. However exhausting it
may be to wrestle one's unique conception of nature onto
the canvas, or the printed page, at least one is not hindered
by doubts that one has the right to.

The artistic relationship to reality, as well as the

human relationship to nature, has become that of participant

rather than observer.

Chapter 5

The Waves

 

Whereas in The Voyage Out Woolf saw the a-human element

 

represented by our flesh with something like horror, by the

time she writes The Waves she has come to regard it with

 

awe, as she does all of the natural world. The organic rela-
tionship of humanity to the natural world has become a theme
for celebration. Her most conspicuous motifs are the rising
tide, the pulse of the sea, and the turning of day. To

human loves and hates the earth is indifferent, she believes,
and if there is any purpose to the whirling Of the stars we
shall never know it...yet our heart-beat is the heart—beat

of the ocean; we are borne, singing, on the invisible swell
and strength of its pulse within us.

In To The Lighthouse, the chaos and flux of nature

 

were perceived as inimicable to human concerns. In the first
section, "The Window," Mrs. Ramsay and the rest look out

upon the night from the candle-lit serentiy of their dinner
party and feel as if the outer world were but a "...reflec-
tion in which things wavered and vanished, waterily."

They feel as if they have "...a common cause against all

1

that fluidity out there." In "Time Passes," the brutality

74

75

of chaos and nature's unconcern for us are perceived as
frightening. In the third section, as we move back to the
world of human concerns, it becomes more pliable, more
supple to human imagination; it changes from moment to moment

as the observer changes. In To The Lighthouse, the natural

 

world is perceived as interesting only insofar as human
beings observe it or are influenced by it or reflect upon
it.

Whereas always before, the relationship between the
human consciousness and the natural world had the inter-
mediary of a narrator, someone whose point of view could be

compared with the characters' point of view, in The Waves,

 

any attempt at establishing an "objective" point has been
dismissed. True, a narrator speaks in each of the prologues,
but this narrator is speaking of a landscape unvisited by

any of the speakers in the "play-poem" and whose relationship
to their lives is strictly symbolic. Since we never see or
hear anything but that which the speaker chooses to tell us
about, we are at his mercy. He (or she) tells us he is at
school, on a train bound for home, at a dinner party, and

we must take his word for it. The result is that we have

an uncanny suspicion that the rooms and landscapes may exist
only in our story-teller's head. We suspect that the earth
he walks upon is not as solid as ours. Thus, paradoxically,
while the physical world meshes so completely with the human

story, and seems more than ever to dominate human life, to

76

determine its limits, yet it seems a dream spun by a con—
sciousness drifting through eternal night.
On September 25, 1929, as she is conceiving what will

become The WaVes, Woolf records in her diary: ”Who thinks it?

 

And am I outside the thinker?"2

Nature, in The Waves, is nature only as envisioned by

 

human beings...of course, there is no other way of seeing it
....but Woolf, by dispensing with some "objective” narrator,
has revealed the essential subjectivity of the human vision.

In The Waves there is still an enormous sense of flux,

 

but instead of labeling it chaos, the narrator suspends judge-
ment about the natural world; she does not assign it a value
in human terms, but rather tries to convey a sense of some-
thing perceived that is really beyond our ken, a reality
beyond human understanding.

Before, a landscape that seemed either grimly foreboding
or serenely indifferent was one that could be scanned with
the eye; now the horizon has receded to the outermost reaches
of human imagination. Bernard says,

I reflect now that the earth is only a pebble flicked

off accidently from the face of the sun and that

there is no life anywhere in the abysses of space.

He is at times aware of the vastness of the universe.

....the light of the stars falling, as it falls now,

on my hand after traveling for millions upon millions

of years--I could get a cold shock from that for a

moment--not more, my imagination is too feeble.4

Not only is there a sense of having broken through the barriers

of human space, but also of human values. The passage cited

w..- ...—_._.. .

 

77

below is taken from the prologue to the third section of

The Waves.

 

In the garden the birds that had sung erratically
and spasmodically in the dawn on that tree, on that
bush, now sang....in chorus, as if conscious of com-
panionship....Also they sang emulously in the clear
morning air, swerving high over the elm tree...es-
caping, pursuing....And then tiring of pursuit and
flight,1ove111ythey came descending, delicately
declining...sat silent, their bright eyes glancing.

To continue:

Now glancing this side, that side, they looked deeper,
beneath the flowers, down the dark avenues into the
unlit world where the leaf rots and the flower has
fallen. Then one of them, beautifully darting, accu-
rately alighting, spiked the soft, monstrous body of
the defenceless worm, peeked it again and yet again,
and left it to fester. Down there among the roots
where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were
wafted; drOps formed on the bloated sides of swollen
things. The Skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter
oozed too thick to run. Yellow excretions were exuded
by slugs and now and again an amorphous body with a
head at either end swayed from side to side. The
gold-eyed birds darting in between the leaves ob-
served the purulence, that wetness, quizically. Now
and then they plunged the tips of their beaks savagely
into the sticky mixture.

The birds are beautiful, quick, bright, lovely and utterly

inhuman in their choice of food. Their beauty is what de-

lights us; we tend to ignore what delights them. Woolf, by

bringing it vividly to our attention, emphasizes their

strangeness for us. They have a place in the world which we

can appreciate only intellectually, and not emotionally.
Another entry, this one dated 26th January, 1930 reads,
The interludes are very difficult, yet I think essen-
tial; so as to bridge and algo to give a background--
the sea; insensitive nature.

By "insensitive," she almost certainly means "insensitive to

human concerns."

78

In spite of this sense of "otherness” there is an inter-
weaving of the human and natural world in the use of man-made
things as similes for natural things. No human being crosses
the seascape of the prologues, but a boot is stuck in the
sand, and the wreck of a shallop litters the shore, and once
the waves are described as driving in and back with the
"muscularity of an engine." Trees on the ridge of a hill-
top are likened to the clipped mane of a horse. In each of
the prologues to the chapters the extensive descriptions of
the natural world contain similes and metaphors of human
beings, human activity, human creation.

In the Opening prologue that describes the dawn, "...the
sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it,"
and ”...the wave....drew out again, sighing like a sleeper."
The dawn is compared to a woman raising a lamp higher and
higher in the sky; this image is continued over several of
the sections. In the third:

The girl who had shaken her head and made all the

jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured

jewels with sparks of fire in them dance, now bared

her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight

pathway over the waves.
In section five,

The sun....was no longer half seen and guessed at,

from hints and gleams, as if a girl couched on her

green-sea mattress tired her brows with water-globed

jewels that sent lances of opal-tinted light falling

and flashing in the uncertain air like the flanks of
a dolphin leaping, or the flash of a falling blade.9

79

Birds are compared to "skaters rollicking arm—in-arm,"
flowers are compared to bells:

....a bud here and there shook out flowers, green

veined and quivering, as if the effort of Opening

had set them rocking, and pealing a faint carillon

as they beat their frail clappers against their

white walls.
The waves are compared to: "....turbaned warriors...with
poisoned assegais who, whirling their arms on high, advance
upon the feeding flocks, the white sheep."11

This way of seeing, of comparing birds to skaters, or
waves to turbaned warriors, is not sentimental anthropromor-
phism, for there is no attempt to show purpose by the ways
things are described. There is no hint that non-human things
are concerned with human goals. Her similes are an acknow-
ledgement that we can't perceive nature except in human terms.
We draw analogies between our inner and outer realities. The
great thing is not to fall into the trap of believing in our
symbols, of mistaking the abstraction for the reality. While
we can only see the processes of the natural world in human
terms, we can still have the largeness of vision to perceive

that nature's aims may not coincide with human aims.

In The Voyage Out, the author seemed to make her compari-

 

sons in a clever, cutting, and rather conventional manner
(Rachel is compared to a puppy who drags underwear into the
hall; another women is "an impertinent but jolly little
pig"); her intent seemed to be to define and limit the way

in which the reader saw her characters. Now, the similes are

80

used as a way of expanding the reader's perceptions about a
character; they supply the function that intuition plays
when we meet someone. The rational mind supplies one kind of
information, and the novelist can give us that in conversa-
tion, description of person, unfolding action. But only a
poet can give us revelation.

Each of the characters has his or her own motif, his or
her own image that expresses the essence of that character's
being. For Susan, it is a cat. Her green eyes, her jealousy,
her maternity, her single-mindedness, all are feline; she
moves with "the stealthy yet assured movements....of a wild

beast."12

And in one memorable passage, she methodically
buries what disgusts her.

Louis envisions himself as a tree whose roots go deep
down into past civilizations. In his imagination, he sur-
faces at the dawn of civilization on the banks of the Nile,
a statue whose lidless eyes watch veiled women carry water
from the river. He has absorbed and understood human his-
tory; he feels that it is his duty to add something to that
treasure of intellectual history, to "forge a ring of poetry
like clear steel." But his other motif is the chained ele-
phant,"the great brute...who stamps and stamps." He has
tremendous intellectual power; he was "the best scholar in
the school." But he is under a compulsion to clear his
family name; he cannot forget his father's financial dis-

grace .

81

Rhoda's metaphor is water: in foam, fountains, pools;
she is "....the nymph of the fountain always wet.” From the
moment we meet her, rocking her white petals on waves in
her basin until she drowns herself and becomes foam indeed,
she has no discreet shape for her personality; unstable as
water, she does not trust the supporting walls of her own
identity to contain her. She says of herself,

I have no face....Alone, I often fall down into

nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I

should fall off the edge of the world into nothing-

ness. I have to bang my hand against some hard door

to call myself back to the body.13

Rhoda says of herself,

I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims
of the rocks with whiteness...14

The characters both become what they see and reveal themselves
by what they see. The dividing line between the internal and
external worlds has faded, become almost insubstantial. In-
deed, in this novel the characters seem not to have skins,

but rather permeable membranes.

....Our senses have widened. Membranes, webs of
nerve that lay white and limp, have filled and Spread
themselves and float round us like filaments, making
the air tangible and catching in them far-away sounds
unheard before. 5

While this image is rather different from the one of a per-
meable membrane (and really doesn't bear thinking about too
closely!) it does suggest the kind of intermingling with

their surroundings that is typical of the characters.

82

In previous novels, much of the characters' thought
would be abstract, but now Woolf impales every thought,
every emotion on some concrete natural image.

'How strange,‘ said Bernard, 'the willow tree looks
seen together. I was Byron, and the tree was Byron's
tree, lachrymose, down-showering, lamenting. Now
that we look at the tree together, it has a combed
look, each branch distinct.

Bernard, stripped of his illusions by Neville, thinks,
'Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he
went over me....dragging me openi laying bare the
pebbles on the shore of my soul. 7

Jinny, feeling herself at home in ”society” thinks to her-
self,
, . 18
I now begin to unfurl....as a fern....
For Jinny, the symbol is flame. Her colors are crimson

and gold. Bernard says of her: "She flashed her fire over

the tree....She was....febrile....Darting, angular....she
came....So little flames zigzag over the cracks in the dry
earth."19 And Jinny, reflecting upon her love affairs, says

of herself:
....smoke and flame have wrapped us about; after a
furious conflagration....we have sunk to ashes,
leaving no relics, no unburnt bones, no wisps of
hair to be kept in2$ockets such as your intimacies
leave behind them.
Also, her passion seems sterile; it is a kind of love which
consumes but does not create.
Bernard's symbol is the spider web. Transitory, ephe-

meral, exquisite and impossible to capture or make permanent,

it represents both his gift and his concern: conversation

83

and communion with people. Also, when there is a fly caught

in it, he is beset by indecision: ”Shall I free the fly?

Shall I let the fly be eaten?"21

Two images that run through Neville's thoughts are the
apple tree that he was gazing at when he heard that a man
had been found dead, and naked boys squirting each other with
hoses.

More important, however, is the fact that the boundaries
between human beings and the world in which they find them-

selves have all but disappeared.
In To The Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay thinks,

It was odd...how if one was alone, one leant to
inanimate things; trees, stream, flowers; felt
they expressed one; felt they became one; felt
they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irra—
tional tenderness thus (she lggked at that long
steady light) as for oneself.

While there is a strong sense of a relationship with nature
expressed in that passage, nevertheless there is also a
sense of distance, a disbelief in the "oneness” felt. In
The Waves, Louis says, ‘

I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My

roots go down to the depths of the world, through
earth....I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and

the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs....
my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.

This is more than allegory; it is partly a declaration of the
oneness of our flesh with earth, partly it is an acknowledge—

ment that on some level, we do become what we see. Susan

thinks to herself,

84

....I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees

....I am not a woman, but the light that falls on

this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons....

Januafiy, May, November; the mud, the mist, the

dawn.

This is a celebration of human oneness with nature; it
is also a kind of wondering acknowledgement of that uncoer-
cible element within us. Nature, that seemed so pliant and
supple to human imagination and human reason in To The Light-

house, has become more recalcitrant in The Waves. The

 

characters feel the forces in their lives to be givens.
Sometimes these forces that rule them are perceived as
external, as when Rhoda feels herself an unwilling passenger
in or ”on" life.
With intermittent Shocks, sudden as the springs of
a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from
the sea. It is to this we are attached; it fig to
this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses.
And Neville, as his train draws into the station, feels a
similar emotion:
I will sit still one moment before I emerge into that
chaos, that tumult....The huge uproar is in my ears.
It sounds and resounds....like the surge of a sea.
We are cast down on the platform with our handbags.
We are whirled asunder. My sense of self almost
perishes; my contempt. I become drawn in, tossed
down, thrown sky-high.
At other times these forces are perceived as internal; each
of the characters seems highly aware of his or her own
"nature." They are very aware of their limitations. When
they gather to say farewell to Percival, they are only in

their early twenties, but they have a strong intimation of

What life will be like for them.

85
Susan, although she loves Bernard, the story-teller,
knows:

The only sayings I understand are cries of love, hate,
rage, and pain.

And Bernard, who might have been a novelist, is aware that
he
....cannot hear the pressure of solitude. When I

cannot see words curling like ringg of smoke round
me I am in darkness--I am nothing. 8

In the case of Bernard, and also of Louis, there is a strong
sense that they have been limited by force of circumstance
from becoming all that they might have been. Louis might
have been a poet, but that he is under a compulsion to re—
deem his family's good name, and poetry demands more than
one's spare time. Bernard, in his old age, is haunted by

....those old half-articulate ghosts who....turn

over in their sleep, who utter confused cries,

who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at

fiivzsbéegrggto escape-~shadows of people one might

In The Waves she tries to show us human beings as part
of physical nature. They are trapped by their limits....
urged on by the power of their blood...finite and yet able
somehow to escape the limits of their skins by their imagina-
tions.

Everywhere, too, nature is in motion; none of her images
are static or "fixed"; everything is running, flowing,
flowering, quivering with life. In addition, there are, from

time to time, quite explicit remarks about the relationship

of the individual consciousness to the world. Bernard's

86

state of mind when he visits Rome is a case in point.

’Here I am shedding one of my life-skins, and all
they will say is, 'Bernard is spending ten days in
Rome.'....observe how the dots and dashes are begin—
ning, as I walk, to run themselves into continuous
lines, how things are losing the bald, the separate
identity that they had as I walked up those steps.
The great red pot is now a reddish streak in a wave
of yellowish green. The world is beginning to move
past me like the banks of a hedge when the train
starts like the waves of the sea when a steamer
moves.3

When Bernard has a premonition of his death--his eternity--
things become suddenly still for him. When he shakes this
off and resumes the rhythm of life, the world seems to be
in motion once more.

Not only is there a quickening sense of movement, but
the very substance of the natural world had changed. The
imaginative eye of the artist probes the surfaces of things
and finds them mutable. Air is dissolved into atoms, brick
into dust, and the outlines of grass and trees melt and run
like water under the blazing sun.

Through atoms of grey-blue air the sun struck at
English fields and lit up marshes and pools, a white
gull on a stake, the slow sail of shadows over blunt-
headed woods and young corn and flowing hayfields.
It beat on the orchard wall, and every pit and grain
of the brick was silver pointed, purple, fiery as if
soft to touch, as if touched it must melt into hot-
baked grains of dust. The currants hung against the
wall in ripples and cascades of polished red....and
all the blades of the grass were run together in one
fluent green blaze. The trees' shadow was sunk to

a dark pool at the root. Light descending in floods
dissolged the separate foliation into one green
mound.

87

The perception behind this imaginative vision is that perma-
nence is an illusion, an attempt to grasp the moment as it
slips by. The reality is that we have no solid earth to
stand on; it changes even as we attempt to examine and
understand it. Our perceptions are hopelessly outdistanced

unless we can make a leap of the imagination to accompany

the flux of matter as it races past us.

Part II: Character
Chapter 6

The Voyage Out

In her first novel, Woolf presents the reader with a
landscape that is uninviting at best, and frequently menac-
ing or ominous. The temperature rises like a fever, the
heat withers away all freshness and beauty, and the ugli-
ness of the world is revealed in the bleak glare of a trOp-
ical sun. This world is inhabited by human beings at least
as unlovely as their surroundings. From the rude little
street urchins who mock the Ambroses as they leave London
(whose streets are thronged with "bigoted workers” and the
poor who are "rightly malignant") to the cripples displaying
”mutilated members" in the streets of the South American
town where the voyagers disembark, the characters who people
the background of The Voyage Out are an unattractive lot.

At the start of her career, the author had felt herself
pitted against an obtuse mass of inhumanity. She felt
superior to the insensitive and unimaginative creatures who
were sunk in their mindless stupidity and unaware of the
terror and absurdity of the human predicament.

88

89

Lytton Strachey wrote to Virginia Stephen from a resort

where he was spending a short holiday, and described the

guests to her.

Besides the golfers there are some of the higher
clergy--bishops and wardens-—ant two lawyers at

the chancery bar. Of course these are all golfers
as well....Their conversation is quite amazing,

and when I consider that there must be numbers

of persons more stupid still, I begin to see the
human race en noir, Oh God! Oh God! The slowness
of them, the pomp, and the fatuity! They're cer—
tainly at their best when they argue, which they did
last night on the subject of cruelty and sport.—-

'I console myself with the thought that animals
themselves are very cruel-—of course not stags, no--
but look at a weasel!’ I shrieked with laughter,
and it was quite unnecessary to control myself,
because they notice nothing. Good heavens, how
happy they must be!

While that is, of course, Strachey and not Woolf, neverthe-

less

one supposes that he expected a sympathetic reaction

to his letter, based on his knowledge of his friend and her

character. He wrote the letter in 1909. Virginia Stephen

was working on The Voyage Out, and her Opinion of the gen-

eral

one.

race

run of humanity does not seem to have been a very lofty

At one point in the novel, during a sermon, Rachel Vin-

contemplates the woman next to her:

....looking at her carefully she came to the con-
clusion that the hospital nurse was only slav1shly
acquiescent, and that the look of satisfaction was
produced by no splendid conception of God within
her. How, indeed, could she conceive anything far
outside her own eXperience, a woman With a common-
place face like hers, a little round red face, upon
which trivial duties and trivial spites had drawn
lines, whose weak blue eyes saw Without inten51ty
or individuality, whose features were blurred,

90

insensitive, and callous? She was adoring something
shallow and smug, clinging to it, so the obstinate
mouth witnessed, with the assiduity of a limpit;
nothing would tear her from the demure belief in

her own virtue and the virtues of her religion.

She was a limpit, with the sensitive side of her
stuck to a rock, forever dead go the rush of fresh
and beautiful things past her.

Laying aside for a moment the whole question of assessing
someone's character by a perusal of her physiognomy, there
seems to be a certain lack of generosity in Rachel's summing-
up. Perhaps one could plausibly argue that it is only Rachel
speaking, and not Woolf. However, Woolf has sketched Rachel
from parts of her own character, and one suspects that Woolf
is doing some editorializing here. This is not, by any
means, an isolated instance. Even Hewet, that determined

optimist, has a little moue of distaste when he contemplates

his fellow-humans.

'They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble,‘ he
thought, ....He glanced at them all, stooping and
swaying and gesticulating round the table-cloth.
Amiable and modest, lovable even in their content-
ment and desire to be kind, how mediocre they all
were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one
another! There was Mrs. Thornbury, sweet but
trivial in her maternal egoism; Mrs. Eliot, per-
petually complaining of her lot; her husband a

mere pea in a pod; and Susan--she had no self and
counted neither one way nor the other; Vennins was
as honest and brutal as a school-boy; poor old
Thornbury merely trod his round like a horse in a
mill; and the less one examined into Evelyn's charac-
ter the better, he suspected. Yet these were the
peOple with money, and to them rather than to others
was given the management of the world. .Put among
them some one more vital, who cared for life or for
beauty, and what an agony, what a waste. Would they
inflict on him if he tried to share With them and

not to scourge!

91

'There's Hirst,’ he concluded, coming to the figure
of his friend; with his usual little frown of concen—
tration upon his forehead he was peeling the skin

off a banana. 'And he's as ugly as sin.’ For the

ugliness of St. John Hirst, and the limitations that

went with it, he made the rest in some way respon-

sible. It was their fault he had to live alone.
Although Hewet seems to be trying to see the picnickers as
objectively as possible, his abstractions: "amiable,” ”modr;
est," and ”lovable" are not tied to any concrete image, as
are the derogatory phrases which follow immediately after,
and so effectively cancel any benign impression the first
ones might have made on the reader. His thought, "...he's
as ugly as sin" suggests that Hewet may be harbouring (un-
known to himself) some rather hostile feelings towards his
outspoken friend. The narrator seems aware of his projec-
tion: "....he made the rest in some way responsible." It
is possible that Hewet (who defends Hirst loyally to Rachel,
but with a trace of malice) does not like to admit having
negative feelings towards a friend{

Both the narrator and her characters frequently make
cutting comparisons with animals; they deride human beings
in general, either humorously or bitterly, depending on
their mood. The passengers of large ocean-liners cannot
decide whether the cargo of the Euphosyne is alive, or
even human.

The insect-like figures of Dalloways, Ambroses,

and Vinraces were also derided, both from the ex-

treme smallness of their persons and the doubt,

which only strong glasses could dispel, as to

whether they were really live creatures or only
lumps on the rigging. Mr. Pepper with all his

92

learning had been mistaken for a cormorant and

then, as unjustly, transformed into a cow.4
Closer proximity doesn't mean a more tolerant outlook. Mr.
Ambrose is chased out of his room "....like an errant hen";
the well—fed hotel guest "....has the appearance of croco-
diles so fully gorged by their last meal that the future of
the world gives them no anxiety whatever.5 Helen and Rachel,
eavesdropping outside the hotel window, hear: "....an uneven
humming sound like that which arises from a flock of sheep
pent within hurdles at dusk."§ St. John Hirst remarks (after
the mail has been distributed) that the guests' silence
”....reminded him of the silence in the lion—house when each
beast holds a lump of raw meat in its paws."7 An obese but
stylishly—dressed little woman makes Helen think of "...an
impertinent but jolly little pig.”8 Susan Warrington's
sleep "with its profoundly peaceful sighs and hesitations...
resembles that of a cow standing up to its knees all night
through in the long grass."9 When the guests at the ball
hear the music and assemble they are described ”like the
rats who followed the piper."10 Helen says 0f Rachel (when
the latter asks her a personal question) "It's like having
a puppy in the house having you with one--a puppy that brings
one's under-clothes down into the hall."11 It is Helen,
also, who makes one of the most searing remarks.

....she had always found that the ordinary person

had so little emotion in his own life that the

scent of it in the lives of others was like the
scent of blood in the nostrils of a bloodhound.12

93

This unlovely image recurs (no pun intended) in Mrs.

Dalloway when Septimus Smith is visited by Dr. Holmes:

 

"Human nature, in short, was on him—~the repulsive brute,
with the blood-red nostrils. Holmes was on him.”13
Septimus' vision is supposed to be distorted; that is

the terror of his madness: his warped and incomplete vision

of humanity. Although the characters in The Voyage Out

 

try (as Hewet tried) to be reasonably humane in their
assessments of peOple, all too often their sentiments in
that direction ring hollow; the really vivid images are
quite memorably uncomplementary. Helen is supposed to be
the wisest and most perceptive person in the novel, and
even she is shadowed by this grim spectre of a remorselessly
callous world. As she finishes her tirade, Helen

...looked about her as if she had called up a

legion of human beings, all hostile and all

disagreeable, who encircles the table, with

mouths gaping for blood, and made it appear

a little island of neutral country in the

midst of the enemy's country.

Certainly the only ones in the story who have any
semblance of humanity seem to be (with the exception of
the nurse who tends Rachel during her illness) the little
group of tourists who move between the villa and the hotel.

The South American tribe that the travelers encounter

on their trip downriver are presented as practically

inhuman.

94

Peaceful, and even beautiful at first, the sight
of the women, who had given up looking at them,
made them feel very cold and melancholy.
'Well,' Terence sighed at length, 'it makes us
seem very insignificant, doesn't it?’
Rachel agreed. So it would go on forever and
ever, she said, those women sitting under the
trees, the trees and the river.
The gaze that follows them about the village seems less
beautiful than repulsive, however:
As they sauntered about, the stare followed them,
passing over their legs, their bodies, their
heads, curiously, not without hostility, like
the crawl of a winter fly.16
The characters in the novel usually seem more repulsive
in proportion to their distance from the main characters in
the story. A notable exception to this is Dr. Rodriguez.
The author seems to be relieving herself of an understand-
able antipathy towards the medical profession. Rachel's
illness parallels that of Thoby Stephen's in that in
neither case did the doctor understand the seriousness
of the situation. Thoby Stephen was being treated for
malaria while he was dying of typhoid fever. In TVO,
Terence questions the doctor about Rachel's condition:
'There is no reason for anxiety, I tell you- none,‘
Rodriguez replied in his execrable French, smiling
uneasily, and making little movements all the time
as if to get away...His [Hewet's] confidence in the
man vanished as he looked at him and saw his
insignificance, his dirty appearance, his shifti-
ness, and his unintelligent, hairy face.
Not all the animosity is reserved for the background
characters; St. John Hirst, while the author respects his

intelligence and fundamentally likes him, nonetheless is

95

made to say some outrageously boorish things— usually to
or about women.

'Women interest me,‘ said Hewet...

'They're so stupid,’ said Hirst...

'I suppose they are stupid?’ Hewet wondered.

'There can't be two Opinions about that, I imagine,
said Hirst... 18

'unless you're in love'

When he holds a brief conversation with Rachel at the ball,
he manages to reduce her to tears within the space of
perhaps five minutes. They are discussing literature.

'About Gibbon,’ he continued. 'D'you think you'll
be able to appreciate him? He's the test, of course.
It's awfully difficult to tell about women,’ he
continued, 'how much, I mean, is due to lack of
training, and how much is native incapacity...'
...Hirst's eye wandered about the rodm...With the
best will in the world he was conscious that they
were not getting on well together.19

Lytton Strachey, from whose character Hirst is drawn, was
certainly misogynist in his outlook; he probably liked and
respected Virginia Stephen because she did not dissolve
in tears when challenged, but gave as good as she got.
However, her treatment of Hirst makes it quite plain that
her attitude towards that kind of contemptuous treatment
from the male sex was not forgiving.

Here is Hewet philosophizing with Hirst:

'The truth of it is that one is never alone, and
one is never in company....You can't see my
bubble; I can't see yours....and supposing my
bubble could run into someone else's bubble- '
'And they both burst?' put in Hirst.

'Then- then- then- ' pondered Hewet....'it would
be an e-nor-mous world, he said, stretching his
arms to their full width, as though even so they
could hardly clasp the billowy universe.

'I don't think you altogether as foolish as I
used to, Hewet,’ said Hirst. 'You don't know
what you mean but you try to say it.‘

96

Earlier in the passage, Hirst remarks that he envies Hewet
his capacity for not thinking. He doesn't put himself out
to be charming to anyone. His compulsively contemptuous
remarks on Hewet's speculations don't seem to discourage
the recipient, but it is not surprising that Terence is
ripe for a more sympathetic audience.

Woolf sympathizes with Rachel's and Terence's need
for closeness, for love, for communication. Unfortunately,
they are limited in their access to sympathetic listeners.
Their engagement seems to be a deeper entanglement than
the one they feel ready for. The strongest reason for
the engagement seems to be their shared sense of a profound
and frightening loneliness, made more acute by their austere
and inhospitable surroundings. Their behavior here seems
worth examining. As they walk into the forest,he asks
her if she is frightened.'

'No,' she answered. 'I like it.' She repeated

'1 like it,’ and was walking fast, and holding

herself more erect than usual....

Igou like being'with me?’ Tergnce asked.

es, With you, she replied.

He says that they are happy together; Rachel responds,
"Very happy." Then he says, "We love each other," and
Rachel echoes, "We love each other.” They walk still more
rapidly, come to a halt, clasp each other for a moment
and then sit down, their faces ”very pale and quiet."

'We love each other,‘ Terence repeated, searching

into her face....'Terrible- terrible,‘ she
murmured after another pause, but in saying

97

this she was thinking as much of the persistant

churning of the water as of her own feeling...

she observed that the tears were running down

Terence's cheeks.
In the whole canon of English literature, I doubt if one
could find a young couple's confession of mutual love
transpiring in a more funereal atmosphere. They return
from their excursion utterly exhausted, as if emotionally
burdened. There seems to have been no sense of release,
no sense of joy. The emotional atmosphere is as sluggish
and Oppressive as the humidity. The jungle has been both
a catalyst and a metaphor.

Woolf rarely shows us the happy side of their rela-
tionship; she tells us they are delighted with each other
and happiest in each others' company, then shows them
bickering.

In solitude they could eXpress those beautiful
but too vast desires which were so oddly uncom-
fortable to the ears of other men and women-
desires for a world, such as their own world
which contained two peOple seemed to them to be,
where peOple knew each other intimately and
thus judged each other by what was good, and
never guarrelled, because that was a waste of
time.2

However, this idyllic relationship is never shown.
Woolf seems to be saying exactly the sort of things about
the couple that they might say of themselves...at least
to their casual acquaintences. At first one suspects
Woolf of elaborate irony, because when Terence and Rachel

interact, there is a lot of discord and uncertainty

expressed about their engagement. Woolf's rhetoric about

98

their happiness is not rooted in any exchange that shows
their happiness in each other. It seems that the author
wants her characters to live happily ever after, but they
are quite determined to be themselves, and they are not

really suited for marriage. Here, Terence is meditating,

and Rachel playing the piano.

There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her
music, quite forgetful of him,- but he liked

that quality in her. At last, having written

down a series Of little sentences, with notes Of
interrogation attached to them, he observed

aloud, 'Women- under the heading Women I've
written: 'Not really vainer than men. Lack of
self-confidence at the base of most serious faults.
Dislike Of own sex traditional, or founded on fact?
Every woman not so much a rake at heart as an
Optimist, because they don't think. What do you
say, Rachel? Rachel said nothing. Up and up the
steep spiral Of a very late Beethoven sonata she
climbed.24

Once more he interrupts her; once more she ignores him,
then:

'NO, Terence, it's no good; here am I, the best
musician in South America, not to speak Of
EurOpe and Asia, and I can't play a note because
Of you in the room interrupting me every second.’
'You don't seem to realise that that's what I've
been aiming at for the last half-hour...I've no
Objection to nice, simple tunes- indeed I find
them helpful tO literary composition, but that
kind Of thing is merely like an unfortunate Old
dog going round on its hind legs in the rain.25

Doubtless it was in reference to such passages that Clive

Bell wrote (after Virginia requested his Opinion) that
...to draw such sharp & marked contrasts between
the subtle, sensitive, tactful, gracious,

delicately perceptive, & perspicacious women,
& the obtuse, vulgar, blind, florid, rude,

99

tactless, emphatic, indelicate, vain, tyrannical,
stupid men, is not only rather absurd, but rather
bad art, I think.
Her reply was that,
...for various psychological reasons which seem
to me very interesting, a man, in the present
state Of tbs world, is not a very good judge
of his sex. 7
At any rate, perhaps we could believe Of Terence that he
liked the "impersonality" and only disliked Beethoven
sonatas if Woolf had not added, near the end of the chapter,
some lines that confirm Terence's distaste for Rachel's
independence.
Terence...was looking at her keenly and with dis-
satisfaction. She seemed tO be able to cut
herself adrift from him, and to pass away to
unknown places where she had no need Of him.
The thought roused his jealousy.
'I sometimes think you're not in love with me
and never will be....I don't satisfy you in the
way you satisfy me...There's something I can't
get hold of in you.27
Terence's insistance that Rachel tell him about the
details Of her life at home helps her to believe that her
life is interesting and worth hearing about, even when
she protests that all she has done is feed rabbits for
twenty-three years. It is true that he draws her out and
is attentive to the extent that his attention engages her
interest in him; when her interests move outward (or inward)
he is not pleased. His love for her is more of a depen—

dency than a genuine caring which leaves the beloved some

Space in which to breath, some room (Of her own) in which

100

to grow. He is threatened by her absorption in her music
because it takes her away from him, and Rachel's first
love is her music. Terence seems both more dependent and
more heedful Of company than is compatible with a life
committed to artistic endevour. At one point he says,

'I want to write a novel about Silence,‘ he said;

'the things people don't say. But the difficulty

is immense.’ He sighed. 'However, you don't

care,’ he continued. He looked at her almost

severely, 'Nobody cares. Never mind. It's the

only thing worth doing.‘ Whether or not he found

the contemplation of the art of fiction so

satisfying as to drive all other wishes from

his mind, he looked to Rachel as if he had

forgotten her presence.
While this passage suggests that under the right circum-
stances he might develOp into a strong, creative individual,
his behavior while Rachel is practising indicates that
his need for love and attention overshadows all his other
needs. Instead of chattering away incessantly about what
he intended to write, he might have gone into the other
room and written it while she practiced. However, that
is apparently not as appealing to him as the attempt to
realize his metaphor Of human personalities as bubbles
which might merge upon contact and dissolve individuality
in an ideal union.

Rachel, in spite of her greater youth and immaturity,

has some doubts as to the feasibility of this solution.
Not that it isn't attractive to her. She, however, is

usually the first to point out the difficulties of achieving

an ideal relationship. "We bring out the worst in each

101

other— we should live separate."29 Rachel's perception
is that absorption in each other will not be enough.

...she wanted many more things than the love of

one human being- the sea, the sky. She turned

again and looked at the distant blue, which

was so smooth and serene where the sky met the

sea; she could not possibly want only one human

being.30

Rachel is quite introspective and mulls over her
predicament as an intelligent young woman; she is resent-
ful of male priviledge and male power, but she doeSn't
set out to challenge them. She seems to be paralyzed.
Woolf reveals that Rachel is aware that her Options have
been narrowly defined and that she resents that, but
nevertheless she slips into the role society has prepared
for her. Terence Offers both excitement and security.
Moreover, he embodies all that Rachel has missed. He
has a university education; he has traveled; he has the
freedom to make his own decisions without consulting any—
body. Doubtless, a large part of his attractiveness is
his liberty. Nevertheless, considering his possessiveness,
Rachel's "natural" destiny, marriage, is for her a dubious
prOposition: it would have squelched her talent and
stifled her growth.
There is a split in Rachel's consciousness insofar

as her wishes are concerned. Near the end of chapter 22,
Rachel realises quite vividly that marriage, at least any

form of marriage that she is familiar with, cannot possibly

fulfil all her dreams.

102

...she wanted many more things than the love of
one human being- the sea, the sky. She turned
again and looked at the distant blue, which was
so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea;
she could not possibly want only one human
being.

Her trepidation and Terence's apprehension of it are almost
sufficient to make them break Off the engagement at this
point. But their fear of loneliness drives them back
together, even though they suspect that they will be
disappointed and disillusioned in the marriage. Woolf

ends the chapter on a rather dismal note.

They stood together in front of the looking—glass,
and with a brush tried to make themselves look as
if they had been feeling nothing at all, neither
pain nor happiness. But it chilled them to see
themselves in the glass, for instead Of being vast
and indivisible they were really very small and
separate, the size of the glass, leaving a large
space for the reflection of other things.

Only two chapters later, Rachel sits serenely by
Terence and contemplates her situation.

...the methods by which she had reached her present
position, seemed to her very strange, and the
strangest thing about them was that she had not
known where they were leading her. That was the
strange thing, that one did not know where one was
going; or what one wanted, and followed blindly,
suffering so much in secret, always unprepared

and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing

led to another and by degrees something had formed
itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last
this calm, this quiet, this certainty, gnd it was
this process that people called living. 3

She reaches these conclusions as she sits by Terence as

he is sleeping. When he is awake, he irritates her more.
'Part Of this may be due to the fact that Virginia

Stephen had a lot Of conflicting feelings about matrimony.

On the one hand, she did not want to go on living with

 

103

her brother Adrian; they were not well suited to each other
in temperament. Also, even to her, marriage was proof of
"normality"; proof that she was an acceptable and satis-
factory woman. Moreover, the fact remained that she very
much wanted to be special to someone. After her sister
Vanessa married Clive Bell, she felt left out, especially
since she had depended on her sister's attention, and this
was pre-empted first by Vanessa's husband and later, by
her children. Virginia tried to recover some of this
attention by carrying on a long flirtation with her brother-
in-law; this was unsatisfactory to her, because Clive had
all the power in the relationship, and could hurt Virginia

very much, as his son, Quentin Bell, writes, "...by the
34

simple expediant of making love to his wife." Virginia
even once accepted an offer of marriage (which was hastily
withdrawn) from an avowed homosexual, Lytton Strachey.
Whether or not she would have withdrawn her acceptance

if Strachey hadn't been the first one to panic is doubt-
ful. She does seem to have had a strong desire for
marriage at this time in her life. Violet Dickenson,

who was woman towards whom Virginia directed a great deal
Of her passion, was nevertheless unable to supply enough
affection and reassurance for Virginia's insatiable
craving, at least since Vanessa's marriage had removed

that source Of warmth from Virginia's immediate environ-

ment. After a trip to Italy, where the unhappiness of

 

104

being the "odd one out” in a kind of love—triangle had
driven her to cut short her journey with her sister and
brother-in-law, and return to London alone. She wrote

a letter to Violet which begins,

Why don't you write to me? I might be buried in
Messina, or bugeaten in Florence, or vanished,

or prostitute, or in lovg, or pregnant, and you
would not know or care.3

She is only about one-fifth in jest. In fact, given the

evidence of her overwhelming love-need, her very real

reticence to become someone's wife seems somewhat surprising.

However, unlike Rachel Vinrace, Virginia Stephen was already

committed to becoming an artist. She had no desire to
form an alliance which would mean giving up her solitary
hours at her writing-table for sociable hours at a tea-
table, or any other kind of domestic slavery.

When Leonard Woolf proposed, Virginia wrote him a

long letter which reveals the deep conflict within her on

the subject of marriage.

...I can't explain what I feel- These are some of

the things that strike me. The obvious advantages

of marriage stand in my way. I say to myself, Anyhow,
you'll be quite happy with him; & he will give you
companionship; children, & a busy life. Then I say

By God, I will not look upon marriage as a profession...

Then, of course, I feel angry sometimes at the
strength of your desire...I sometimes feel that no
one ever has or ever can share— something- Its the
thing that makes you call me like a hill, or a rock.
Again, I want everything- love, children, adventure,
intimacy, work...So I go from being half in love
with you, and wanting you to be with me always, to
the extreme of wildness & aloofness. I sometimes
think that if I married you, I could have everything-
and then- is it the sexual side of it that comes
-between us? As I told you brutally the other day,

I feel no physical attraction in you. There are
moments- when you kissed me the other day was one-
when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your

van—-

105

caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It
is so real, and so strange. Why should you?...
it's just because you care so much that I feel I've
got care before I marry you. I feel that I must
give you everything; and that if I can't, well
marriage would only be second-best for you as

well as for me...We both...want a marriage that

is a tremendous living thing, always alive...We

ask a great deal of life, don't we? Perhaps we
shall get it; then how splendid!37

Her passionate declaration, "By God, I will not look
upon marriage as a profession" comes from the artist and
feminist who had to "strangle" the ”angel in the house"
in order to create. In The Voyage Out, Evelyn's musings
seem to give voice to some of that trepidation which the
author felt, even after Rachel has accepted Terence and
seems to find herself content with being engaged.

Evelyn...had been looking from Susan to Rachel.
Well- they had both made up their minds very
easily, they had done in a few weeks what it
sometimes seemed to her that she would never
be able to do...for the sake of this one man
they had renounced all other men, and movement,
and the real things of life. Love was all very
well...but the real things were surely the
things that happened...in the great world out-
side...Of course they were happy and contegg,
but there must be better things than that.
After Rachel's death, it seems that much of the author's
conflict about the state of matrimony finds an outlet in
Evelyn; her gentle refusal of Mr. Perrott sounds as if it
must have been taken from Virginia's own experience in
refusing Walter Lamb.
There are not only the very real arguments of the

feminist-artist against marriage, however. There are other

fears about the fate of women who marry expressed in

106

Rachel's death. There is not only the fear of psychic
death, there is the fear of literal death. How could
she escape drawing (unconsciously, perhaps) the conclusion
that sexuality and death are linked when Stella's death
followed her marriage so quickly? The deaths of the two
maternal figures in her life must have made it very
frightening for her to contemplate having an active
sexual life...which marriage seemed to demand.

Rachel's death is not only an Opportunity for the
author to express her feelings about death in general,
and to express some of the conflicts most intelligent
young women must have felt about marriage, but it was
also an indication of her deepest fears about marriage
and sexuality. Rachel's divided feelings about marriage
are to a great extent, Virginia Stephen's divided feelings
about marriage. And her fate, I believe, reflects the

author's deepest fears for her own fate if she married.

Chapter 7

Jacob's Room

 

Woolf's treatment of character in Jacob's Room differs

 

sharply from her treatment of character in The Voyage Out
in several ways, but most noticably in her substitution of
a series of short vignettes for a detailed portrait of a
personality. We have glimpses of Jacob, sometimes in
conversation, sometimes in action, but mostly we receive
our impressions of him indirectly, either through the
thoughts and conversations of the other figures in the
novel, or through the narrator.

The woman who sat down to write Jacob's Room had
matured a great deal since she finished The Voyggg_0ut.
She had the satisfaction of being an established author;
with four books to her credit which were selling reason-
ably well and which had received favorable criticism, she
no longer considered herself a failure. She had the
companionship and care of Leonard Woolf. That his love
had survived her two years of madness must have been a
source of great reassurance and security for her. Moreover,
the fact that she had recovered, with her personality and
creative gift intact, must have strengthened her sense

of self.
107

108

Some or all of this may account for the freshness of

her approach to Jacob's Room. Then too, she no longer had

 

to write for the approval of a publisher; after they founded
the Hogarth Press, she and Leonard could publish what they
liked.

The entry in her diary for January 26th, 1920 reveals
some of her feelings about her prOSpective novel.

I'm...happier today than I was yesterday having
arrived at some idea of a new form for a new
novel. Suppose one thing should open out of
another--as in An Unwritten Novel--not only for

10 pages but for 200 or so--doesn't that give

the looseness and lightness I want; doesn't that
get closer and keep form and speed, and enclose
everything, everything? My doubt is how far it
will enclose the human heart--Am I sufficiently
mistress of my dialogue to net it there? For I
figure that the approach will be entirely different
this time. No scaffolding: scarcely a brick to

be seen; all crepuscular, the heart, the passion,
humour, everything bright as fire in the mist.
Then I'll find room for so much-~a gaity--an
inconsequence—-a light spirited stepping at my
sweet will. Whether I'm sufficiently mistress of
things--that's the doubt but conceive The Mark on
the Wall, g9 & Unwritten Novel taking hands and
dancing in unity. What the unity shall be I have
yet to discover: the theme is a blank to me; but

I see immense possibilities in the form I hit upon
more or less by chance 2 weeks ago. I suppose the
danger is the damned egotistical self; which ruins
Joyce and Richardson to my mind: is one pliant and
rich to provide a wall for the book from oneself
without its becoming, as if Joyce and Richardson,
narrowing and restricting?

 

 

Whether or not such a method is ”limiting" is not
really the question; rather, one asks if the narrator has
a limited vision, for no other mode of writing--perhaps

not even a diary--displays the inside of a writer so

 

completely as the method Woolf employs in Jacob's Room.

109

Woolf herself is the subject of her novel; Jacob is
an occasion for her musings and ruminations about the
problems, glories, possibilities, and limitations of civili-
zation. His life is the scaffolding upon which she hangs
her philOSOphy. In spite of occasional lapses into self-
doubt ("the damned egotistical self"), she feels that
she has something interesting to say, something worth
listening to.

The largest part of Jacob's Room is authorial commen-

 

tary, presented as something overheard, or as something
aside from the "action" of the story. The author's tone
is that of gossip and tour guide through the hero's life;
we meet Jacob onLy at crucial instances, catching glimpses
of him at home or at school, eavesdrOpping on him at a
dinner-party. Most of the time Woolf is "meditating aloud”
upon the world as it was about twenty years prior to and
up until World War I.

While her journal entry (quoted above) shows her to
be more interested in the style and form of her novel
than in the theme, it must have been forming in her mind
for several years. World War I had ended less than a year

and a half before Woolf started to write Jacob's Room.

 

-Some years later, when Hitler and Mussolini were gathering
their armies together for conquest, she sat down to write
Three Guineas, in which she analyzed some of the cultural

and psychological reasons why men wage war. It is an

110

outSpokenly feminist book, and has never been very kindly
treated, especially by male critics.

Even so sympathetic a reader as her nephew and
biographer, Quentin Bell, describes it as

the attempt to involve a discussion of women's

rights with the far more agonising and immediate

question of what we were to do in order to meet

the ever—growing menace of Fascism and war.

The connection between the two questions seemed

tenuous and the positive suggestions wholly

inadequate.
However, unhappily for our world even today, the connection
between the psychological peculiarites which are developed
in the private home and are conspicuous in the public sphere
is in no way "tenuous"; the one is the logical and reasonable
outcome of the other. Woolf's point, and it is quite valid,
is that patriarchy depends for its existence upon the
willing subservience of its women. If dominance were not
considered a desirable male sexual trait, it is doubtful
if men would be willing to go to war simply to maintain
their feeling of being dominant.

In 1910, Virginia Stephen had had a brush with military
pomposity and self-importance in the matter of the
”Dreadnought Hoax,” which was, briefly, a prank played
on the British Navy by six young pacifists: Horace Cole
(who planned and engineered it), Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley,
Duncan Grant, Adrian Stephen, and Virginia Stephen. Four
of the party (Virginia included) were outlandishly garbed

as "Abyssinians" and two as British Foreign Office Officials.

They simply sent off a telegram to the Commander-in—Chief

111

Home Fleet, allegedly from the Foreign Office, asking for
a guided tour of the H.M.S. Dreadnought. They got it.
They spoke a mixture of Swahili and Virgil, and the one
seaman who spoke Abyssinian, and who would have been their
downfall, was away on leave. The hoax was successful,

and all but Horace Cole were willing to let the matter

end thee, but Cole reported the incident to the newspapers.
Almost no one was pleased. Virginia received an admonatory

letter

from Dorothea Stephen in which she declared that
it was a silly and vulgar performance; she would
not scold, she would merely point out that,
clearly, Virginia's life was very unsatisfactory
and that she stood in need of religion.

More serious, in Virginia's eyes, was the near—beating of
Duncan Grant.

Willy Fisher and his brother Officers reacted in
an appropriately aggressive manner, The Honour of
the Navy had to be saved, and it could be saved
only by the corporal punishment of the hoaxers.
After a series of disappointments and of rather
absurd arguments on matters of punctilio and
prOpriety, the naval party did succeed in
abducting Duncan Grant and taking him to Hamstead
Heath, where they were again more than half
defeated by the gentle perplexity and mild
courage of a pacifist in carpet slippers.

Quentin Bell's commentary on the matter reads as follows:

...the theme of masculine honour, or masculine
violence and stupidity, of gold-laced masculine
pomposity, remained with her for the rest of her
life. She had entered the Abyssinian adventure
for the fun of the thing; but she came out of it
with a new sense of the brutality and silliness
of men. And this perception came, in its turn,
to reinforce political sentiments which gad for
some time been taking shape in her mind.

112

In view of all this, it is surprising that Woolf is
as restrained as she is.

Certainly the war must not only have horrified her
in its ghastly destruction, and reinforced her disgust
for the patriarchal system, but it must have also streng-
thened her doubts about its values. The war was the }
logical result of its love of hierarchies, its carefully
codified bullying, its lust for authority and its contempt
for gentleness and sensitivity.

Jacob's Room can be read as a whyawar novel, if not
as an anti-war novel. Her belief about war is that clam-
oring against it has never done any good, and that the
proper tone to take is one of complete indifference to
it. She is explicit about the political nature of that
indifference in Three Guineas. The didactic, heavily
ironic tone of that book would have been inapprOpriate
in a novel, and probably have made caricatures of its
characters.

Political writing, by its very nature, exagger-
axesthose features of personality which seem to control
a person's actions or define his limitations. The
vignettes of Jacob's life are not colored by anger or
prejudice; the voice of the narrator is neither strident
nor harsh as she relates them; there is not a false note

anywhere.

113

The creative artist and the social critic speak with
two entirely different voices, even when they inhabit
the same body. Woolf, as a planner and critic of her own
novels, seems to be speaking out of a wholly different
level--a whole different psychic "self" than the Woolf
who plunges deep into the realms of pure imagination.

So she sees, but does not always evaluate, Jacob's
situation. She envisions him, and I do not think that
it is so much conscious restraint of her ironic voice
that keeps her from "telling" rather than "showing” us
the reality that creates Jacob's personality, as it is
the fact that she is simply Operating out of a much more
deeply imaginative level. She portrays, but does not
interpret-~didacticly, at least——Jacob's reality.

Her social and emotional perspective must determine
what she envisions, and her experiences must influence
her interpretation of that vision, but she does not
overtly proselytize. The closest she comes to it is
in her commentary on the heads of state who are deter-
mining whether or not England should enter the war.

His head—-bald, red-veined, hollow-looking-—
represented all the heads in the building....
Pitt and Chatham, Burke and Gladstone looked
from side to side with fixed marble eyes and

an air of immortal quiescence which perhaps

the living may have envied....Moreover, some
were troubled with dyspepsia, one had at that
very moment cracked the glass of his spectacles...
altogether they looked too red, fat, pale, or

lean, to be dealing, as the marble heads had
dealt, with the course Of history.

114

Woolf's point throughout Three Guineas is that patri-

 

archy is a caste system which depends for its maintenance
upon the willingness of human beings to let themselves
be catagorized as functions, rather than as full, spon-
taneous, creative beings...and that this system is one
maintained by every "civilized" society in the world.
Therefore, divisions of politics into "democracy",
"socialism”, "fascism", "communism", etc., are all less
important to the functioning of these societies than the
fact that all these systems are maintained for the benefit
of the few at the expense of the many, and that they are
all essentially similar in their treatment of women.
Her argument is that if people really want a more pacific
world, they would do well to examine their motives for
excluding women from the larger world and for dividing
that world into rigid catagories, with carefully stratified
ranks. She points out that many men's reason for living
seems based almost entirely upon how many human beings
they can control, beginning with the women in their
families. Power over others becomes a raging mania
which gets completely out of control...because patriarchy's
definition of an important person is one who controls
other peOple.

The cultural patterns which develOp in males a sense
that it is ”natural" for them to wish to dominate others
are explored artistically in Jacob's Room, as they were

politically in Three Guineas.

 

115

While in Three Guineas she assures us that she knows

 

and will explain to anyone with time to listen, the causes

of war, in Jacob's Room she seems to be merely pondering

 

them. Her assumption seems to be that all decent people
are against war, so why do wars keep happening? What is
it in the private world that encourages this cold imper-
sonality, this lust for domination, this passion for
superiority which must be maintained at all costs, in
otherwise decent young men? In this novel, she is
exploring the system of upbringing which leads cultured
and intelligent young men to go to war.

The scene at the beginning of chapter three--when
Jacob enters a railway carriage already occupied by a
nervous elderly woman who knows, like Ti-Grace Atkinson,
that ”men are dangerous" and is prepared to heave her
scent-bottle at his head should he attack her-~15 amusing
to us because we know that Jacob isn't the type to attack
his country-women. However, it is true that under the
right circumstances, men are dangerous, and Jacob in a
war is quite probably a different person than the Jacob
traveling up to Cambridge.

Woolf deliniates some of the factors which helped
to form character of a young man of the British middle
classes prior to WWI. While there are almost certainly
some traces of Thoby Stephen in Jacob's character--his
bull-headed determination as a toddler, his large calm,

his quiet self-sufficiency, his beauty--he is too

116

incompletely defined to be more than typical. If one
dislikes Jacob, it is for those traits which are peculiar
to his class and sex. Those passages which describe in
Jacob some characteristics which are unbecoming to human
beings might well be applied to any young man in his
position.

Jacob seems to have been a satisfactory son to his
mother; one who grew into a fine, upstanding young man.
He is no monster; he is, in fact, exemplary. That is the
puzzle. How can a lovable young man, deferential to old
ladies, shy with young ladies, polite to both, respectful
to his elders and honorable to his friends, be a party to
something as horrible as war?

The circumstances and modes of behavior which develOp
a certain impersonality and aggressiveness in Jacob are
so common as to be invisible. Yet Woolf describes them
for us. Jacob is reared believing in his natural right
to possess and control his world. From the incident with
the crab, which Jacob removes from its habitat and then
forgets, to the fact that Jacob's mother finds herself
unable to make her toddler lay down the sheep's jaw he
has found, Jacob subtly imbibes a sense of power. His
mother does not rule him, she remonstrates with him.

It's a great experiment coming so far with young
children. There's no man to help with the '
perambulator. And Jacob is such a handful;

so obstinate already.

'Throw it away, dear, do,' she said, as they got

into7the road; but Jacob squirmed away from
her.

117

Even as a toddler, Jacob is supplicated, rather than
commanded. Later on, he comes and goes as he pleases, at
least in his mother's house. Probably much of Jacob's
regal and pompous attitude towards women stems from his
mother's reverential attitude towards men.

The narrator spends as much time on Jacob's surround-
ings and their history (the moors above Scarborough,
Cambridge, Southampton Row) as she does on him. The
history of Jacob's culture has a lot to do with who he
is. "All history backs our pane of glass. To escape
is vain."8 She frequently calls attention to Jacob's
role as an heir. In spite of his father's early death,
Jacob is not left fatherless. Mr. Floyd educates him;
Captain Barfoot advises Mrs. Flanders on the subject of
Jacob's education. He is treated paternally by his dons,
and at Cambridge especially, he has the sense of being
the continuer of a proud and hoary tradition that dates
back to the age of Pericles. His mother, as a widow, has
a harder time of it than Jacob has as an "orphan," for
he is a favored son of his country. If he is not wealthy,
he is at least "well-connected" and a member of the
educated classes. England is his oyster. Wherever he
goes, he is welcomed. Jacob's company is the prize for
which all in the book compete.

The narrator's relationship to Jacob is an ambivalent
one. Insofar as he partakes of Thoby Stephen's essence,

he has a legitimate claim to her affection...and also to

118

her jealousy. To the extent that he is merely a ”type"
he seems to elicit a kind of oblique hostility, which
is manifested chiefly in the author's depiction of his
concrete relations with others, especially women.

That she wanted to guard against this tendency is
plain from the number of times that she suggests,
humorously or seriously, that she does not know every-
thing about Jacob.

But how far was he a mere bumpkin? How far was

Jacob Flanders at the age of twenty-six a stupid

fellow? It is no use trying to sum peOple up.

One must follow hints, not exactly what is said,

nor yet entirely what is done. Some, it is

true, take ineffaceable impressions of character

at once. Others dally, loiter, and get blown

this way and that. Kind old ladies assure us

that cats are often the best judges of character.

A cat will always go to a good man, they say;

but then, Mrs9 Whitehorn, Jacob's landlady,

loathed cats.
This particularly passage, as a denial that she has not
got the key to Jacob's character, that she does not under-
stand him completely, is unusual in its wittily derrogatory
nature. For the most part, such denials of knowledge
seem perfectly sincere and straightforward.

As the quotation from her diary indicates, Woolf
perceives her role as narrator in JR as a "wall" against
which the other characters will appear, and fears that

her presence will cast a shadow rather than a light upon

the"page.

119

...there remains over something which can never
be conveyed to a second person save by Jacob him-
self. Moreover, part of this is not Jacob but
Richard Bonamy—-the room; the market carts; the
hour; the very moment of history. Then consider
the effect of sex—-how between man and woman it
hangs wavy, tremulous, so that here's a valley,
there's a peak, when in truth, perhaps, all's as
flat as my hand. Even the exact words get the
wrong accent on them. But something is always
impelling one to hum vibrating, like the hawk
moth, at the mouth of the cavern of mystery,
endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of
qualities her had not at all--....what remains
is mostly a matter 8f guess work. Yet over him
we hang vibrating.1

Here she abdicates the role of narrator as one who is the
omniscient discloser of personality; she appears to be
evaluating Jacob entirely as an outsider. Her Opinion
seems to be that if Jacob can be known at all, it must
be through observation rather than through intuition.

However, even though the author takes a pose of
uncertainty regarding Jacob's character, nevertheless
her protests that she does not really know him somehow
ring hollow, as they do not when she uses a similar
technique in assessing Mrs. Ramsey's character. Eric
Auerbach, in Mimesis, discusses this.

...the author looks at Mrs. Ramsey not with

knowing but with doubting and questioning

eyes- even as some character in the novel

would see her in the situation in which she

is described...

Although in Jacob's Room Woolf moves around her character

 

and views him curiously, from different angles, seeming

to wait for him to reveal himself to her, she makes so

120

many definitive remarks about him that the reader feels
that she is only feigning ignorance. While this passage

by itself is quite convincing,

It seems then that men and women are equally at
fault. It seems that a profound, impartial,
and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-
creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are
men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or
we are sentimental. Either we are young, or
growing old. In any case life is but a
procession of shadows, and God knows why it
is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see
them depart with such anguish, being shadows.
And why...are we yet surprised in the window
corner by a sudden vision that the young man
in the chair is of all things in the world
the most real, the most solid, the best known
to us- why indeed? For the moment after we
know nothing about him. Such is the manner
of our seeing. Such the conditions of our

love.

taken with some of her more definite statements, it seems

almost an apology.

She assumes a pose of comparative ignorance or bland
objectivity concerning his character and then proceeds to
sketch him in a rather compromising position. In spite
of her disclaimers, she is assessing him constantly as
a human being and finds him wanting. Sometimes the
situation needs no comment from the narrator at all.

Mrs. Papworth, of Endell Street, Covent Garden,
did for Mr. Bonamy in New Square, Lincoln's Inn,
and as she washed up the dinner things in the soul-
lery she heard the young gentlemen talking in the
room next door....As she held the plates under
water and then dealt them on the pile beneath

the hissing gas, she listened; heard Sanders
speaking in a loud rather overbearing tone of
voice: "good," he said, and "absolute" and
"justice" and "punishment," and "the will of

the majority." Then her gentleman piped up;

she backed him for argument against Sanders.

121

Yet Sanders was a fine young fellow (here all the
scraps went swirling round the sink, scoured after
by her purple, almost nailless hands). 'Women-—
she thought, and wondered what Sanders and her
gentleman did in that line, one eyelid sinking
perceptibly as she mused, for she was the mother
of nine--three still-born and one deaf and dumb
from birth. Putting the plates in the rack she
heard once more Sanders at it again ('He don't
give Bonamy a chance,’ she thought)....she....
heard something--might be the little table by the
fire--fall; and then stamp, stamp, stamp as if
they were having at each other--round the room,
making the plates dance.

'Tomorrow's breakfast, sir,‘ she said, Opening
the door; and there were Sanders and Bonamy like
two Bulls of Bashan driving each other up and
down, making such a racket, and all them chairs
in the way. They never noticed her. She felt
motherly towards them....Bonamy....pushed Sanders
into the arm—chair, and said Mr. Sanders had had
smashed the coffeepot and he was teaching

Mr. Sanders--Sure enough the coffee-pot lay
broken on the hearthrug.1

What kind of person can speak pompously and imperiously
on "justice" when he depends for his comforts upon the
slavery of another? Obviously, "justice" is for a
priviledged few. The charwoman's acceptance of her
miserable existence is not an indication that the reader
should accept it as complacently as do Jacob and Bonamy.
Not all the injustices noted are directed at women,
either...Jacob treats all those beneath him in rank with
a sublime complacency...he feels born to rule them.
Jacob's education has conditioned him to believe in the
superiority of his sex and class to the point of being

able to shut out all who don't fall into that category

as unimportant.

122

Meanwhile, Plato continues his dialogue...in spite
of the woman in the mews behind great Ormond Street
who has come home drunk and cries all night long,
'Let me in! Let me in!’
In the street below Jacob's room voices were raised.
But he read on. For after all Plato continues
imperturbably....Jacob, who was reading the
Phaedrus, heard peOple vociferating round the
lamp-post, and the woman battering at the door
and crying, 'Let me in!‘ as if a coal had drOpped
from the fire, or a fly, falling from the ceiling,
had lain on its back, too weak to turn over.
While his dons might have approved of his powers of concen-
tration, the author's revelation that the old woman in
compared (in Jacob's consciousness) to a fallen fly seems
her mordant comment on the sort of education young men
received in the English public schools and universities,
which was one that allowed them to dismiss as negligible
anyone who was not a well-educated British male. Most
particularly damning is the impersonality such education
breeds in one, the assumption that concentration upon an
abstract problem should take precedence over every kind
of humane concern.

Jacob's scholarly training has been a thorough ground—
ing in the art of dispute, or verbal combat. His bellicose
behavior ('Damned swine!') in his critical review of some
author is probably indicative of the way Jacob has been
trained. Education is a battleground, and the students

joust with ideas.

The narrator's estimate of Jacob's grasp of the

classics is somewhat condescending.

123

Durrant quoted Aeschylus- Jacob Sophocles. It
is true that no Greek could have understood or
professor refrained from pointing out- Never
mind; what is Greek for if not to he shouted
on Haverstock Hill in the Dawn? Moreover,
Durrant never listened to Sophocles, nor
Jacob to Aeschylus. They were boastful,
triumphant; it seemed to both that they had
read every book in the world; known every

sin, passion, joy. Civilizations stood round
them like flowers ready for picking. Ages
lapped at their feet like waves fit for
sailing....

'Probably,' said Jacob, 'we are the only peOpée
in the world who know what the Greeks meant}

Elsewhere she refers to him as "insolent"; he certainly
has a high opinion of his own capabilities:
The flesh and blood of the future depends
entirely upon six young men. And as Jacob
was one of them, no doubt he looked a little
regal and pompous.
Those who admire him unconditionally do not have the author's

admiration.

...Dick Graves, being a little drunk, very
faithful, and very simple-minded, told her
that he thought Jacob the greatest man he
had ever known.17

He is compared several times with Greek statuary:
...Sandra Williams got Jacob's head exactly on
a level with the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles.
The comparison was all in his favour. 8
Fanny Elmer must repair to the British museum,
...where, keeping her eyes downcast until she
was alongside of the battered Ulysses, she
opened them and got a fresh shock of Jacob's
presence.
Woolf writes that Fanny's idea of Jacob was, "statuesque,
noble, and eyeless." One wonders if the comparisons with

Greek statuary are a comment on his mental capacities or

124

merely a comment on his sensibilities. Certainly he looks
the part of a hero. Yet his role as a hero is a rather
tongue—in—cheek affair. Woolf nearly always says something
which seems to indicate that she is patronizing or condes-
cending in her attitude towards him. We hear of Percival
only from those who adore him, and he becomes for us also
a myth and a hero. But Percival is a silent center, where
our adulation can rush in unhindered. When we see Jacob
in action, or hear his thoughts, his noble visage is
somewhat tarnished. Certainly his attitude towards

women would compromise him in the eyes of any feminist.

But this service in King's College Chapel- why
allow women to take part in it? Surely, if the
mind wanders (and Jacob looked extraordinarily
vacant, his head thrown back, his hymn-book Open
at the wrong place), if the mind wanders it is
because several hat shops and cupboards upon
cupboards of coloured dresses are displayed

upon rush-bottomed chairs. Though heads and
bodies may be devout enough, one has a sense

of individuals- some like blue, others brown;
some feathers, others pansies and forget-me-nots.
No one would think of bringing a dog into church,
For though a dog is all very well on a gravel
path, and shows no disrespect to flowers, the
way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting

a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose
that makes the blood run cold with horror (should
you be one of a congregation- alone, shyness is
out of the question), a dog destroys the service
completely. So do these women....Heaven knows
why it is. For one thing, thought Jacob, they're
ugly as sin.20

The comparison of a woman in church with a dog looking
for a pillar to spray is odious enough in itself, but the
implication is worse: in Jacob's eyes, women are sub-human,

perhaps souless. They do not have any right to exist for

125

themselves; they exist for others. According to Jacob's
view of things, they might logically be included in the
service if they suitably beautiful. Lacking beauty, they
ought to be dismissed as unsightly obstructions to reverant
feelings. A similar instance occurs when Jacob is in
Greece, visiting the AcrOpolis. He tries to appreciate
the sublimnity of ruins, but cannot, and chooses to lay
the blame on an overweight female tourist.

...there was Madame Lucien Grave perched on a block

of marble with her kodak pointed at his head. Of

course she jumped down, in Spite of her age, her

figure, and her tight boots— having, now that her

daughter was married, lapsed with a luxurious

abandonment, grand enough in its way, into the

fleshy grotesque; she jumped down, but not before

Jacob had seen her.

'Damn these women— damn these women!’ he thought...

'How they spoil things,'....

'It is those damned women,‘ said Jacob, without

any trace of bitterness, but rather with sadness

and disappointment that what might have been

should never be. (This violent disillusionment

is to be expected in young men in the prime of

life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon

become gathers of families and directors of

banks).
Jacob is slyly compared to a healthy stud horse; perhaps
as a dig at the culture which looked upon young women of
good families as little more than brood-mares for the next
generation.

The narrator is a feminist, but not her characters...
at least not those that have anything to do with Jacob.
The two exceptions, Mrs. Jarvis and the rather harrassed
woman in the library, both seem faintly ridiculous. The

charwoman's attitude towards the young men she waits on

126

is typical of the attitude of the women surrounding Jacob.
Fanny Elmer does not see any injustice in her situation;
she accepts Jacob's preeminence as part of the nature of
things.‘

...isn't it pleasent, Fanny went on thinking, how

young men bring out lots of silver coins from

their trouser pockets, and look at them, instead

of having just so many in a purse?22
In her worshipful attitude towards Jacob, she is entirely
free of any taint of jealousy. She does not ponder the
contrast between his financial security and her own hand-
to-mouth existence except insofar as his wealth seems to
her another deliciously attractive sexual trait, like his
self-assurance or his muscular build or his beautiful voice.

Clara Durrant (like Virginia Stephen in her youth) is

kept under as tight a surveillance as an ax-murderer. She
is accompagnied everywhere she goes, her correspondence
is subject to search and seizure, even her diary is rationed
(actually, the author had more freedom than that, but there
were strong similarities between the two situations).
While Clara's brother Timmy comes and goes as he pleases,
her every move is monitored by her mother. Jacob's friend
Bonamy, paying her a visit "kept on...accumulating amaze-
ment at an existence squeezed and emasculated within a
white satin shoe."23 However much pain this squeezing
causes Clara, we hear no direct complaints from her; she
is, however, subject to sudden and inexplicable outbursts
of weeping. Clara is, of course, the logical companion

for Jacob, but her relationship to him is very carefully

127

and narrowly defined by their culture. While they share
a middle-class or upper-middle-class background, they do
not share an intellectual background. Clara has not been
to the university, nor traveled alone, nor been prepared
for any wider role in life than that of a wealthy man's
wife. So Jacob, if he wants to explore the world of
women, must make do with mistresses, prostitutes, artist's
models, other men's wives. To all of them he lends books,
Shelly, Fielding, Donne. Only Sandra Wentworth Williams
appreciates the book-—as one more trOphy for her collection.
It is to Jacob's credit that he does not really appreciate
this aspect of his "masculine privilege;" he has enough
feeling to be frustrated and occasionally revolted by the
fact that he cannot have a true companionship with a
woman.

The problem is insoluable. The body is harnessed

to a brain. Beauty goes hand in hand with stupidity.

There she sat staring at the fire as she had stared

at the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending

indecency, Jacob doubted whether he like it in the

raw. He had a violent reversion towards male

society...and was ready to turn in wrath upon

whoever it was who had fashioned life thus.
He has not enough feeling, however, to reject what scraps
he can have.

The narrator is very gentle with Jacob after his
betrayal by Florinda; although she does say, "fear of him
comes first," an indication that it might be wise to stay

out of the way of intemprete male wrath. Given what we

know of his sensibilities, his decision (though sanctioned

128

by male society) seems faintly disgusting. Jacob's reaction
to Florinda's faithlessness is not, as one might surmise,
to have done with the notion that women can be treated as
bodies without minds, but rather to go the extreme, and
exchange a mistress for a prostitute. In Jacob's brief
exchange with the prostitute, Woolf manages to convey a
stifling sense of claustrophobia felt by a woman trapped
in that kind of life.

'This weather makes me long for the country,‘ she

said, looking over her shoulder at the back view

of tall houses through the window.

'I wish you'd been with me on Saturday,‘ said

Jacob.

'I used to ride,‘ she said....

Altogether a most reasonable conversation; a most

respectable room; an intelligent girl. Only

Madame herself seeing Jacob out had that leer,

that lewdness, that quake of the surface (visible

in the eyes chiefly), which threatens to spill

the whole bag of ordure, with difficulty held

together, gger the pavement. In short, something

was wrong.

Just exactly how wrong is something Woolf does not
seem eager to pursue at this time. To fully comprehend
what kind of emotional make-up one must possess in order
to buy the use of another's body might be to lose (at
least temporarily) her capacity to be at all sympathetic
toward Jacob. While it is clear that she does not always
approve of him, she does not see him as despicable. But
since her own reaction to sexuality was rather extreme,
it would be logical to suppose that she would find prosti-
tution more revolting than most, and that she might despise

Jacob completely for being able to participate in such a

sordid transaction.

129

If her point is that men as well as women suffer from
the unfair treatment of the sexes, and that is stultifying
to both men and women to be catagorized as functions, rather
than as peOple, she cannot make Jacob so much a perpetrator
as a victim of injustice. But it is difficult for her not
to see him in that way. It isia measure of her artistic
imagination that she is able to see such a person as Jacob
as at all disadvantaged by the system...or find him as
sympathetic a character as she does. Woolf seems to struggle
to like Jacob; it doesn't come easily to her. She takes 1
a condescending attitude towards him and his aims and
accomplishments most of the time. He is presented as
pompous-appearing, and what we see of his thoughts and
actions confirm in us the suspicion that he is both pompous
and conventional. He is willful and determined and adven-
turous, but not terribly bright. He isn't exactly an
intellectual (certainly he isn't articulate), and although
he had a kind of shallow idealism (why not rule countries
the way they should be ruled?) he doesn't have a great deal
of humanity. He is vain and callow and doesn't seem to
have an original thought in his head. His fatuousness
seems crowned by the sort of woman he chooses to fall in
love with. While he is given all the Opportunities Virginia
Stephen yearned for: a university education, the Opportunity
to study at leisure uninterrupted by family duties, the
opportunity for free conversation with brilliant men, the

Opportunity to travel unchaperoned, to have adventures,

130

to mix with all sorts of people, in the end he seems not
to benefit very greatly from these advantages. His studies
didn't seem to throw any special illumination on his way;
he seems to stride the straight and narrow path of a mediocre
conformity...and nOt to have any original insight. In
spite of (or because of?) his Cambridge education, his
intellectual friends, and his European tour, he emerges
as a kind of moral bumpkin. Ultimately he is a "type"
rather than an individual. Had Woolf made him more of

an individual, his death might have moved us, even if we
found much to disapprove. As it is, Jacob is not the most
interesting or sympathetic character in this story; the
narrator is. Her comments, asides, Observations and
phiIOSOphy are what make the novel interesting and worth-
while. She emerges as a curious, interested spectator

and commentator on her world-—and ours. She seems,
moreover, to be striving for a pose of detachment (one
which had seemed to come naturally to her in EEG) about
human folly. Her affections have been engaged. She finds
something in human beings more lovable than she used to,
and she is therefore more passionate than dispassionate

when she observes or records injustice.

Chapter 8

Mrs. Dalloway

In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf's characters become fully

 

alive. In The Voyage Out she told, rather than showed,
what her characters were thinking and feeling, with the
result that we never quite trusted the reality of
characters' perceptions....especially as they sometimes
appeared to be acting out of feelings which must have been
at variance with those their author had ascribed to them.

In Jacob's Room she gives us exquisite short snippets

 

of personalities, but these are never quite enough to

make up an entire human being. Also, there is, in Jacob's
539m a single, although shifting perSpective. For
example, the bay wobbles when Betty Flanders' eyes fill
with tears, but we are conscious that the narrator is
telling us how Betty Flanders sees the world. ‘Things

come to us noticeably filtered through the consciousness
of the narrator; she tells us what and how her characters
are feeling, imagining, dreaming. It is the narrator's
imagination--like a stage manager--guiding, arranging,
coloring the flow of her characters' perceptions. In

M, sue has granted her characters full humanity at last.
For them, as for herself, flowers that do not bloom in

131

132

their imaginations as well as in their gardens have no
fragrance. Moreover, these characters have a strongly
diversified reSponse to their external world. In M2,
Woolf trusts her characters to speak for themselves.

While it may be argued that they tend to speak in the

same tone of voice (with the possible exception of

Rezia), nevertheless they speak with strongly differing
Opinions. For example, Rezia sees the London park as
bleak and hideous, to Peter Finch it is an ordered paradise
after his sojourn in India, Septimus perceives it as alter-
nately ravishing and terrifying, and Clarissa sees it
through a haze of glory. For the first time, the subjec-
tivity of each person is fully respected. NOt that the
narrator agrees with all their perceptions equally, but
each character's perceptions seem to be coming from the
character, and not through the consciousness of the
narrator.

The author's movement towards her characters has in
some respects been completed in this novel. Certainly
this is not to say that either Septimus or Clarissa is
identical to the author, but only that the most salient
characteristics of each represent important aspects of the
author's personality.

In this novel Woolf is exploring, more profoundly
than ever before, some purely personal issues and she

lets her characters express some of her deepest conflicts

133

and strongest tensions. Woolf draws very heavily on her
own psyche for the various components of her characters'
personalities.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf portrays characters through

 

whom she chooses to express some very important aspects
of her own personality--Septimus and Clarissa. These
characters are the ones closest to her--and at times I
am not entirely certain whether the narrator is "over—
hearing" the internal monologue of one of her characters,
or whether that character is talking about him or herself
in the third person. "Such fools we are, she thought
....for heaven only knows why one loves it so".1

Too much has been written about the extent to which
Woolf models Septimus upon her own remembrances of her
madness—-beginning with Woolf herself, in her diary--to
warrant any serious doubt that that is, indeed, her
intention. But Woolf's comments about Clarissa Dalloway
indicate that she intended to sketch a personality more
like that of Kitty Maxse or Ottoline Morrell than her
own, and yet Woolf and her heroine do parallel each other
in at least one important respect: their sexual reticence,
orifrigidity." The author herself is the template for
Clarissa's sexuality, which is expressed (or repressed)
in a perfectly played role--so far as men are concerned--
rather than acknowledged and accepted as a legitimate
part of herself. To what extent Woolf was aware of this

is problematical; there is nothing in her diary during

134

the composition of the novel that would indicate that
this was part of her intention.

While it cannot be proven, I suspect one thing that
both Clarissa and her author have in common is a feeling
that they have not experienced life to its fullest in
that they have not completely enjoyed their sexuality.
Clarissa's repression of a vital fount of joy and pleasure
drains her energy and creates in her a poignant aching
awareness of her approaching death. "Fear no more heat
'0 the sun," the tag from the mock-dirge sung over
'Fidele' in "Cymbaline" runs all day through Clarissa's
mind and is indicative of her linking sexuality with
death, but also the refrain could indicate that her
feelings are more complex than that.

'Fidele' is a young woman who is disguised a youth
and is not dead, but sleeping. The young woman, Imogen,
was falsely accused of infidelity and condemned to death
by her husband. She disguised herself to avoid his wrath.
Like Imogen, Clarissa has put aside her sexuality except
in relation to women—~she feels something like men feel--
in that respect it would be accurate to say that she has
changed her sex. While she is not in danger of outright
execution if she retains her female sexuality, she is
certainly menaced by Peter's knife. Finally, like Imogen,
her joy in life is not dead, but merely sleeping.

There is ample evidence in the text to support the

idea that celibacy and living death are inextricably linked

135

Clarissa's mind; it is difficult to believe that they were
not also linked in the psyche of the author that wrote
it. "Virginity clung to her like a sheet" is suggestive
of shrouds, clamminess, and the grave. The justaposition
of the frigidity of her marriage bed and the chill of
death is more explicit in this passage:

It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched

and the bed narrow. She had gone up to the tower

alone and left them blackberrying in the sun.

The door had shut, and there among the litter

of birds' nests how distant the view looked, and

the sounds came thin and chill.

Clarissa's frigidity gives her a kind of armor; since
she lacks the strength of self-assertion, she must with-
draw rather than give herself. It is done for self-
preservation, but it is felt as a loss. The images used
to describe that seclusion are cold, sad ones.

There are passages in Woolf's diary while she was
writing Mg, that shOw how concerned she was about life
slipping away, and how determined she was to enjoy it
while she could, but she is always reticent on the
subject of sexuality, especially her own.

Clarissa's virginity is "preserved through child-
birth," a phrasing that suggests her inner self remained
untouched by her physical experience. Although she ”gave”
her body, she could or would not "give" her emotional self.
Likewise, the author's "virginity” was emotionally preserved

in that the physical side of the Woolfs' marriage was

apparently abandoned quite early as a failure. Virginia's

136

inability to respond sexually caused her some distress;
it may have contributed to or exacerbated her mental
breakdown.3

Critics who write about Virginia Woolf often refer
to her as "asexual," a term (when applied to humans)
about as scientifically precise as "neurasthenic," also
frequently used to describe her. Quentin Bell writes
that she was "naturally shy” in sexual matters, and Jean
Love's otherwise perceptive study of Virginia Woolf's
childhood and subsequent development seems to ignore the
fact that Virginia, at the age of six, felt terribly
guilty both about looking at herself in a mirror, and
about Gerald Duckworth's exploration of her genitals.
Love writes that Gerald was reSponsible for her feelings
of shame and guilt, but Virginia wouldn't have felt
guilty about his behavior unless she had had it previously
impressed upon her that her genitals weren't supposed to
be touched. While Woolf writes that she could not
remember having been told that touching her genitals
was "shameful," Love makes no comment about the tendency
of the mind to block or repress uncomfortable memories;
she seems to accept Woolf's evaluation of the situation
at face value.

Love also lets pass Bell's phrase "naturally shy"
which seems strange, because, as a psychologist, Love

certainly is aware that human beings are not ”naturally"

137

shy about their sexuality; "shyness” is more or less
rigorously (in our culture) forced upon them.
In the collection of reminiscent essays, published

as Moments of Being, Virginia describes her mother's

 

manner as rather sharp and severe towards her daughters.
It seems likely that Virginia had been severely repri-
manded for touching her genitals, almost certainly before
she was able even to form words to describe the event to
herself. Her elder sister, Vanessa, writes about Virginia
a fact which seems astonishing (especially in light of

her career) that she did not learn to speak until she

was three years old. This suggests that her relationship
with her mother was not terribly close.

We do know that Julia Stephen was not an indulgent
mother to her daughters--given this information, along
with the knowledge of Victorian attitudes towards
sexuality--we can safely infer that somewhere in the
misty background of Woolf's early childhood, she was
given the message that sexual feelings were bad, naughty,
and shameful feelings.

Those lovely vignettes of Woolf's childhood published
as Moments of Being, contain passages that would seem to
reveal that her early conditioning in the denial of her
own sexuality was as rigorous, if not more rigorous,

than most.

138

There was a small looking-glass in the hall at
Talland House. It had, I remember, a ledge with
a brush on it. By standing on tiptoe I could
see my face in the glass. When I was six or
seven perhaps, I got into the habit of looking
at my face in the glass. But I only did this if
I was sure that I was alone. I was ashamed of
it. A strong feeling of guilt seemed naturally
attached to it.4
Certainly Virginia's face must have been worth looking at:
her enormous green eyes, set in a face composed of very
fine, delicate features and framed with bright red hair,
stared back at a miniature Titania. She must have derived
a pleasure more highly charged than that which came from
the perusal of even very lovely flowers. Her feelings
of guilt seem to stem from something deeper than a feeling
that people will find her vain.
In this passage from The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
describes the erotic nature of narcissism.
For the young girl, erotic transcendence consists
in becoming prey in order to gain her ends.
She becomes an object, and she sees herself
as object; she discovers this new aspect of
her being with surprise: it seems to her that
she has been doubled; instead of coinciding
exactly with herself, she now begins to exist
outside.5
Beauvoir is discussing the phenomenon largely in reference
to what happens to the adolescent girl when she does not
mature emotionally, and remains fixed in her infantile
mode of narcissistic eroticism: "....she does not distin-
6
guish the desire of the man from the love of her own ego."
For Woolf, as for many women raised in a culture which
combines a paradoxical preoccupation with the appearance

of the woman's body as a sexual object and a strong

139

prohibition of the woman's enjoyment of sexual pleasure,
women find they can enjoy sexual feelings only by

perceiving themselves as objects of desire, either in
another's eyes,

or by simultaneously becoming both

subject and object, perceived and perceptor,

as one
confronts an image in a mirror.

Our culture certainly
encourages women to become narcissistic.

Looking into
a mirror,

for a narcissistic person, can be a sexually
charged experience.

I feel it necessary to quote this passage at some

length, for not only its content, but also its tone.

....the looking-glass shame has lasted all my
life, long after the tomboy phase was over.

I cannot now powder my nose in public.* Every-
thing to do with dress-~to be fitted- to come into
a room wearing a new dress--still frightens me;

at least makes me shy, self-conscious, uncomfor-
table. 'Oh to be able to run,

like Julian Morrell,
all over the garden in a new dress'

I thought not
too many years ago at Garsington; when Julian

undid a parcel and put on a new dress and scampered
round and round like a hare.

Yet femininity was
very strong in our family....We were famous for
our beauty-—my mother's beauty, Stella's beauty,
gave me as early as I can remember,_pride and
pleasure. What gave me then this feeling of

shame, unless it were that I inherited, some
Opposite instinct?

puritanical.

 

My father was spartan, ascetic,
He had I think no feeling for
pictures; no ear for music; no sense of the

sounds of words. This leads me to think that my--
I would say 'our' if I knew enough about Vanessa,
Thoby and Adrian--but how little we know even

about our brothers and sisters--this leads me to
think that my natural love for beauty was checked
by some ancestral dread. Yet this did not prevent
me from feeling ecstasies and raptures spontaneously
and intensely and without any shame or the least
sense of guilt, so long as they_were disconnected
with my own body, I thus detect another element
in the which I had in being caught looking at
myself in the glass in the hall.

11 must have been

140

ashamed or afraid of my own body.

Another memory,
also of the hall, may help to explain this.

There
was a slab outside the dining room door for
standing dishes upon.

Once when I was very small
Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this, and as I
sat there he began to explore my body. I can
remember the feel of his hand going under my
clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and
lower.

I remember how I hOped that he would
stop;

how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand
approached my private parts.

But it did not stOp.
His hand explored my private parts too.
resenting,

I remember
disliking it-«what is the word for so
dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong,
since I still recall it. This seems to show that

a feeling about certain parts of the body; how

they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow
them to be touched; must be instinctive.

It proves
that Virginia Stephen was not born on the 25th

January 1882, but was born many thousands of years

ago; and had from the very first to encounter
instincts already acquire

9 by thousands of
ancestresses in the past.

That passage is perhaps the longest one we get from

Woolf on the delicate subject of her sexuality.

While she
makes fleeting references to it in her letters and diaries

from time to time, they are usually rather flippant, in
contrast to this one.

She writes "We were famous for our beauty...

.," but
is only her mother's beauty, Stella's beauty, that give

her "pride and pleasure."

For her own attractiveness is
somehow a source of shame to her.

She says that she is
"ashamed or afraid of my own body."

It couldn't be a lack
of beauty that would cause her shame, and that, in any

case, wouldn't induce "fear." It seems reasonable to ,
suppose that, since she writes that she was able to feel

"ecstacies and raptures spontaneously and intensely and

without any shame or the least sense ofguilt, so long as

141

they_were disconnected with my own body," that the pleasure
she derived from gazing at herself in the mirror was
connected with her own body; both induced by it and located
in it, and this had been impressed upon her as shameful.
Moreover, the incorrect use of "with" for "from" would
indicate that there is in WoOlf both an awareness that
the feelings are "connected with" her body and a need to
insist that they be "disconnected from" her body. That
she still feels this ambivalence and conflict at the age
of sixty is some indication of the strength of the repres-
sive forces in her early childhood. Her linking of the
memory of Gerald's exploration of her genitals with the
memory of looking into the mirror makes the connection
between her narcissism and her sexuality, and, unhappily,
the connection between her sexuality and her shame of
feeling sexual, evident to the reader, if not to herself.
The denial of sexual ecstasy in her own body, her refusal
to let herself feel sexual pleasure if it was apparent to
her that that was the source of her sensation, seems to
have been instilled very early (as such feelings usually
are). She recalls that the incident with Gerald took place
when she was six or seven. What strikes the contemporary
reader, beseiged as she is with psychological monographs
and studies, is that Woolf feels that the incident proves
her shame "instinctive!"
For a woman in our culture, even today, sexuality is

perceived as a state of objectivity; the only conceivable

142

end of desire is to become an object for the beloved, or
an object for one's own imagination. When the divided
consciousness assumes the roles of both subject and object,
as in narcissism, the girl projects her desire for her
own body reflected in the mirror upon an imaginary lover,
and becomes—-in her imagination--both the passive recipient
of desire and the active agent.

Since females are harshly penalized for taking the
active Or initiating role in sex relations, they learn
to define themselves as wholly passive, i.e., a hole to
be filled. They learn that their own desire or receptivity,
whatever effect it may have on the male in actual fact,
is, in the myth of the relationship between the sexes,
utterly ignored. So, in the language of dream and symbol,
formed beneath the conscious mind at an age when she lacks
words to shape and comprehend and argue her case, the girl
learns that her sexual presence in the world, if she is
not desired, is obscene. By feeling these shameful desires
and making her desire apparent to observers, she renders
herself vulnerable to their scorn and she takes the risk
of turning into a pure object, mindless tissue, which may
excite, not desire, but disgust and contempt.

For Virginia Woolf, the capacity to openly flaunt
one's attractiveness (like Julian Morrell) is something
she both envies and deepairs of being able to enjoy

herself. It is too risky.

143

Woolf's most vulnerable character, Rhoda, says again
and again of herself: "I have no face." And even the far
more composed Clarissa, at the height of her party, thinks

to herself, "....oddly enough she had quite forgotten what

she looked like...."8

The fact that Woolf couples the memory of Gerald's
exploration of her genitals with her memory of looking into
the mirror suggests that she felt her pleasure was perceived
as shameful, not only because it may have had erotic over—
tones, but also because she might have confusedly felt
that her interest in herself as an attractive object
caused Gerald to be curious about her body. Moreover,
she had a very strong need for attention and affection--
she never was able to have enough to satisfy her--and she
may have felt that her hunger for affection led to Gerald's
sort of attention. Jean Love discusses her craving for
affection and the reasons for it very cogently.

....her parents and family failed to give her the
love she wanted. The ....reasons are obvious....
her mother's chronic over~extension of herself....
it required a crisis such as the illness of a
child for Julia Stephen to [focus] upon an
individual child....there were times when not
even a sick child kept Julia at home...Virginia
was seventh in a household of eight children, one
of whom was psychotic and in a crisis stage during
Virginia's fir years. ....it is inaccurate to
suppose that Virginia was a rejected, unloved
child, although perhaps she felt she was.
Certainly she received enough affection to know
she wanted more.... Virginia's mother was
especially.loving with infants although she
seemed to have time to express that love consist-
antly and in ways that Virginia could understand
only guring the early months of Virginia's

life. ‘

144

Love also points out that Virginia's psychological develOp-
ment was adversely affected by the fact that she was weaned
at ten weeks-—far earlier than her siblings-~due to Julia's
ill health.

While Julia Stephen was loving with her infant daughters,
she demanded that they be more self-sufficient than her
sons...as a rule. This combination of severity and
tenderness that she extended towards her female children
might have been adequate for most children-—assuming that
she was well enough to be consistent-~but it is doubtful
whether so sensitive and delicately balanced a Child as
Virginia would have been "satisfied" with anything less
than the kind of "Jocasta mothering" that many gifted
people--especially sons--remember enjoying.

Virginia apparently felt that to want something as
innocent as cuddling or stroking was to make too great a
demand on her mother, unless she was sick. Not to be
flippant about Virginia's insufficient supply of affection,
she seems to have even envied the family pets in that
regard. Perhaps, as a child, she saw dogs and cats getting
the kind Of stroking and affection she longed for, because
for the rest of her life she could ask for affection from
others, even from her husband, only if she took the role
or persona of some sort of little furry beast. Her nicknames
for herself ranged from "apes" to "baby wallaby." Quentin
Bell described Flgsh as a book written, not by a dog-lover,

but by a person who wished to be a dog. The point I am

145

stressing is that she did not feel fully entitled even to
the satisfaction of being held--to openly admit to wanting
sexual pleasure must have been impressed upon her as
something extremely wicked, and something that must have
rendered her absolutely unlovable and to feel unlovable

is the most distressing feeling any person can experience.
For someone as sensitive and emotionally dependent as
Virginia Woolf, it must have been unbearable.

In spite of the fact that she was only six years
old, and Gerald was 18, and she was obviously too much
in awe of him to struggle or protest this unwelcome
invasion of her privacy--of her body--she felt guilty,
rather than angry. She feels somehow responsible for
the molestation: "....it was wrong to allow them (her
genitals) to be touched".

She makes herself take full responsibility for the
molestation, in Spite of the fact that there was no choice
for her but to endure it or to put up with the greater
Shame of having her parents know about it and then having
to endure either Gerald's anger or her parents' anger,
or both. Virginia's perceptions about the Situation might
have been correct, for the usual response to a situation
like hers has been to suspect the victim of having been
in some way mischievous, provoking, or otherwise "seductive”

and inviting. To be the centre of an attention consisting

wholly of shocked displeasure was not the kind of attention

She had in mind.

146

Further on she writes,

Though I have done my best to explain why I was
ashamed of looking at my own face I have only
been able to discover some possible reasons;
there may be others; I do not suppose that I have
got at the truth; yet this is a Simple incident;
and it happened to me personally; and I have no
motive for lying about it....Let me add a dream;
for it may refer to the incident of the looking-
glass. I dreamt that I was looking in a glass
when a horrible face - the face of an animal —
suddenly shoed over my shoulder. I cannot be
sure if this was a dream, or if it happened.10

It seems less important whether or not she actually
Saw a face--an animal's face—~in the mirror behind her or
dreamed it, than the fact that sexuality and bestiality
were linked in her mind at a very early age. One recalls
Rachel Vinrace's dream of men who "snuffle" at her door,
and Woolf, in her sketch of George Duckworth, describes
him as having the eyes of a pig.

During Virginia's adolescent years, when the patterns
of her relationship with the Opposite sex were being
established, She was treated with appalling cruelty and
callousness; physical beatings could hardly have been
worse than the emotional drubbing that her half-brother,
George, meted out. Her father, in his dotage and grief
and deafness, left much of the business of running the
family to his step-son, George Duckworth, who was at
that time about thirty—four years old, fairly handsome,

a snob, and an extremely ambitious social climber. Having
failed in his attempt to get Vanessa to accompany him on

his "party circuit" in the evenings, he turned his atten—

tion to Virginia. Like some inept Pygmalion, he attempted

147

to force his miserably shy, self-conscious, intellectual
half-sister into the role of a Social butterfly. She had
the beauty for it, but no aptitude for empty chatter, and
being subjected to the cold scrutiny of indifferent glances
was for her a torture of the first magnitude. But the
glances of strangers were not the worst thing she had
to endure.

Down I came: in my green evening dress; all the

lights were up in the drawing room; and there

was George....He fixed on me that extraordinary

observant....gaze with which he always inspected

clothes. He looked me up and down as if [I]

were a horse turned into the ring. Then the

sullen look came over him....I was condemned

from many more points of view than I can analyze

as I stood there....and conscious too Of fear,

of Shame, and of despair--"Go and tear it up,"

he said at last.11 >
This was the same man who made a practice of coming into
Virginia's bedroom at night, lying down on her bed, and
caressing her. She had no one who could defend her from
his unwelcome attentions. While his maulings and gropings
may have left her technically a virgin, she was emotionally
raped.

I am indebted to Roger Poole for his term, "anesthesia"
to describe Virginia's condition in relation to male sexual
desire.

The effect of George Duckworth's attentions was,
I believe, to traumatize Virginia, and to provoke
in her a sexual anethesia. She could not feel
any normal sexual feeling, and sexual matters

were attended in her mind with fantasies of horror
and dread.12

148

The complete paralysis of her sexual feeling in
relation to men corresponds to the emotional and physical
anesthesia of rape victims who have not been able to work
through the trauma of their violation. The anger that
cannot be released on the violator of one's integrity is
turned inward upon the self. It was only many years after
the incidents took place that Virginia was able to release
some of the anger in her descriptions of George. She
does not seem to have felt so much guilty as outraged
while She wrote of him, but She may have been repressing
guilt as well as anger. The reason I suspect she felt
nothing;'in other words, repressed her feelingsflis that
the repressed feelings are those that cause trouble later.
Moreover, that "numbing herself" was her usual method of
dealing with troublesome feelings, we know from other
instances.

From her accounts of her feelings at her mother's
death, we know that she was extremely detached from her
grief; She felt quite numb.

....I remember....the great bed on which my

mother lay. I remember very clearly how even

as I was taken to the bedside I noticed one

nurse was sobbing, and a desire to laugh came

over me, and I said to myself as I have often

done at moments of crisis since, 'I feel nothing

whatever'. Then I stOOped and kissed my mother's

face. It was still warm. She [had] only died

a moment before.13 .
Also, during Leslie Stephen's terminal illness, Virginia

got through her ordeal by gritting her teeth and refusing

to feel-—only after he died could She collapse under the

149

strain that the combination of nursing and the suppression
of her feelings caused her. Probably she felt equally
distant and numb in George's arms; her anesthesia was her
only refuge. What was being repressed came boiling to
the surface later on...during her periods of madness...

in manic anger.

The male-female relationship was presented to her in
its rawest state as a purely hypocritical exercise of
power. George was leSS concerned about the welfare of
his Sister than the figure he could cut as a benevolent
brother. That he considered himself the judge and owner
of her body and her feelings ("You're too young to have
an Opinion!") let alone her intellect (which he considered
a nuisance) must have impressed her as profoundly unjust,
but She had no recourse: her opinion did not count. It
must have seemed to her that her body was a kind of
commodity. She had no voice in the dressing of it or the
diSposal of it. The only realm of her self that was
secure from invaders were her feelings. She could numb
herself and refuse to reSpond to male desire.

What I have sketched out above is a very abbreviated
version of Woolf's emotional background. However, I hOpe
I have managed to make clear the fact that her difficulties
in owning her feelings, especially her sexual feelings,
stemmed from a variety of sources. The authors whose
works I have quoted have differing opinions about who Should

bear the brunt of the blame for her difficulties. When I

150

first read Moments of Being, I was struck by the anger
Woolf Showed in her descriptions of George Duckworth.
Whether he was fully deserving of her rage (as Poole
thinks), whether he was an easy target for all her
accumulated rage because of the injustices she had
suffered at the hands of her male relatives, is rather
difficult to say. She was envious of Thoby's education,
She was jealous of her mother's doting on Adrian, Gerald
was the first to molest her, her father was from time to
time given to rages which She described as "blind, Sinister,
animal, savage"--and she was expected to endure all this
without overt anger.

George was a convenient target, in that he had the
least attractive personality (for her) of all her male
relatives. He was a philistine and a snob, he denigrated
her intellect and ignored her feelings, and he was
personally repulsive to her in his emotionalism and
greediness.

Given such a miserable introduction to sexuality,
it is doubtful whether, even under ideal conditions, she
would have been able to have a good marital relationship.
And conditions were not ideal--at least not for her
sexual relationship with Leonard.

Since a woman was considered acceptable only if she
was "feminine," that is, of service to others, self-
fulfillment was out of the question. Virginia's case

was no exception. She never had (how many women did?)

151

a model of a Woman who was both autonomous and sexual,
at least not when she was very small and impressionable.
Her mother and father, according to the chapter entitled
"Reminicences," found "joy" and "delight" in each other.
That this was physical delight, as well as emotional,
seems fairly clear. But Virginia's mother was quite
literally the slave Of her husband. The price she paid
for her physical relationship with her husband was a
complete abnegation of her self. For Virginia, a sexual
relationship in which She allowed herself to respond, to
feel satisfaction, would almost certainly have meant
losing her autonomy, for the price her culture and her
family insisted upon her paying for sexuality was a
complete self-effacement. She might, when still a child,
have struck such a terrible bargain, if it were not for
two things. First, she defined herself as a writer, even
before she was eleven years old. Second, Julia Stephen's
self-effacement led to self-eradication.

One of the assumptions of our culture has been that
women can find in Spinsterhood or frigidity a kind of
refuge where they are free from male domination. The
marital relationship has been, and in some cases, still
is, regarded as one where the wife "submits herself" to
her husband's sexual desires. If she frankly surrenders
to her own sexual feelings, in or out of marriage, She
is regarded with feelings ranging from distrust to disgust.

Since sexual feelings were "bad" feelings, of course it

152

was "bad" to give in to them. Especially in Victorian
England, women were trained to believe that it was "wicked"
to surrender to their own sexual feelings, and that "good"
women "surrendered" to their husbands, more was involved

in a sexual relationship than physical "giving" or "being
taken"...it was a surrender of one's own judgement, one's
own will. So it would have been perhaps impossible for
Virginia to feel that she could have a sexual relationship
with a male without losing her integrity.

So what is the relationship between sexuality and
creativity? If Virginia had had to say to herself, each
time she wrote a sentence, "Would Leonard approve of this?"
it is safe to say that she could not have written anything
Of lasting value. This is not to say that Leonard would
have demanded such sacrifice; but rather that Virginia's
conditioning in "the feminine role" would have made her
demand it of herself...and it would have choked off the
wellsprings of her creative self. There would always
have been the Shadow of another presence between her pen
and the page. It was safer not to feel...not to risk both
the loss of love and the one thing that allowed her self-
definition, her chance to create, to write out her personal
vision of the world.

It was undoubtedly due in part to that reason that

Woolf saw marriage and sexuality as so dangerous.

153

Clarissa's need for solitude-—for an undisturbed center
of "inner space"—-parallels Woolf's own need as a writer
for an undisturbed center. In order to secure for them-
selves that "ivory tower" of inner stillness, they had
to relinquish sexual "fulfillment"...at least the pattern
of sexual "fulfillment" offered them by their culture.
Clarissa is ambivalent about her sexual "coldness"
as this passage reveals: "She resented it, had a scruple
picked up Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by
14
Nature (who is invariably wise)..." On the one hand,
She "resents" it...on the other, she feels that it was
"sent" (beyond her control) by an ”invariably wise" nature.
She resents the fact that it deprives her of pleasure and
gaiety, but as it gives her some measure of emotional
privacy, She values it.
Clarissa chooses a cloistered emotional life. She
sleeps alone (like Woolf), rather than with her husband.
....lying there reading....she could not dispel
a virginity preserved through childbirth which
clung to her like a sheet. Lovely in girlhood,
suddenly there came a moment - for example on
the river beneath the woods at Clevden - when,
through some contraction of this cold Spirit,
She had failed him. And then at Constantinople,
and again and again. She could see what she
lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind.
It was something central which permeated;
something warm which broke up surfaces and
rippled the cold contact of man and woman,
or of women together.15

Even her husband who gives her more emotional freedom than

Peter Walsh would have given her, must be kept at bay.

For Clarissa fears that She cannot give herself sexually

154

without losing herself, without being destroyed. Peter
certainly refuses to give her any privacy: "everything
had to be shared, everything had to be gone into"...Peter
intrudes himself without even trying. He disapproves of
her flightiness, her shallowness, her willingness to
compromise. Harsh, aggressive, full of high-minded ideals
but blind to the beauty around him, he is able to spoil

it for Clarissa. When he comes to her party, he stands

in a corner and sulks.

If Clarissa was an artist, then her life as a Society
hostess would have been a kind of death...but that is all
she really wants to be: a hostess, She wants to be felt
kind, considerate, pleasure-giving...she creates an
atmosphere of gaiety and pleasure; in that sense she is
an artist...and Richard Dalloway not lets her do this,
he needs her to do this. And certainly Peter wouldn't
have any use for it.

She could see Peter out of the tail of her eye,
criticizing her, there, in the corner....It was
extraordinary how Peter put her into these

states just by coming and standing in a corner.

He made her see herself; exaggerate. It was

idiotic. But why did he come, then, merely to
criticize? Why always take, never give? Why

not risk one's little point of View?16
Apparently Peter is able, by her very presence, to make
Clarissa feel foolish and inadequate. If she is not able

to stand up to him in that Situation, to Oppose his view

of life with her own, then She was wise to avoid marrying

155

him. Without sufficient firmness of character to stand
up for her view she would have lost her inner self.

Even Richard Dalloway, who is much less obtrusive
than Peter Walsh, is too threatening for Clarissa. Her
choice of a Single bed suggests that she had to establish
some kind of sexual distance from her husband in order
to feel free enough to think her own thoughts, or to feel
her own emotions. In her relations with her husband,
Clarissa needs to shut off the warm sexual part of herself,
and can only feel it--to some extent-~with women, who do
not threaten her.

Clarissa's feelings for Sally Seton parallel those
of Virginia Stephen for Madge Vaughn, who was Virginia's
first youthful passion. Like her author, Clarissa is able
to feel some sexual response with women. Apparently She
was unable--always--to feel any "normal sexual feeling"
with a male, but that she was eventually able to feel some
sexual pleasure is suggested by the description of Clarissa
Dalloway's sensations when She is attracted to a woman.
Whether the author was able to feel this when she was
young, and emotionally involved with Madge Vaughn and
Violet Dickenson is difficult to say. There is no
authentic-sounding evidence of sexual experience in any
of her artistic work until Mrs. Dalloway; not even in

descriptions of supposedly romantic relationships.

156

The sensuousness of the passage which describes
Clarissa's feeling for women is the most sexual thing
we have had so far in Woolf's novels--and seems to be
a revelation of her own subjective experience.
....yet she could not resist sometimes yielding
to the charm of a woman....confessing, as to her
they often did, some scrape, some folly....she
did undoubtedly then feel what men felt....a
sudden revelation, 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 closer, swollen with some astonishing
significance, some pressure of rapture, which
Split its thin skin and gushed and poured with
and extraordinary alleviation over the cracks
and sores! Then for that moment, she had seen
an illumination.1
All her life Woolf depended on affection and warmth
and reassurance from women. Her most constant supply of
this came from her elder sister, Vanessa, but She also
had'a series of love relationships which apparently ranged
from filial to sexual. She was never able to feel sexual
passion for a man. Her husband, although she loved him
dearly, served her more as a parent, a female parent,
than a lover.
At the time Woolf was writing Mrs. Dalloway, She
was also starting to have a friendship with Vita Sackville—
West. This famous relationship is apparently the closest
thing to a genuinely erotic experience W001i had; at least
this seems to be so in light of the evidence that is now
available. An even more powerful argument for the fact

that Woolf had had some genuinely erotic feelings by the

time She writes M2 is the passage quoted above.

157

A great many women in our culture are unable to feel
sexual pleasure, but they do not necessarily go mad as a
result of this. What contributed to Woolf's anguish may
have been her guilt for not feeling. It is unpleasant
enough to be unable to feel anything physically positive
(or positively physical) for the man one has married,
without feeling oneself at fault for this disability.

She was rather light and flippant on the subject of
her marital relationship in a letter to Ka Cox soon after
her marriage.

Why do you think peOple make such a fuss about
marriage and OOpulation? Why do some of our
friends change upon losing chastity? Possibly

my great age makes it less of a catastrophe; but
certainly I find the climax immensely exaggerated.

18
"Chastity" as it is used here suggests that Virginia saw
intercourse, even with one's husband, as a kind of violation
of her integrity, for married women were considered
"unchaste" only if they were promiscuous. Also, it
sounds as if she does not intend to change. And why
does she refer to it as a "catastrophe" unless it was
really felt as a terrible thing? It seems that the
wittiness of her communication is intended to distance
her as far as possible from the whole distasteful subject,
but the strength of her distaste is Shown in her choice
of language.

To continue the same letter, the next sentence reads,

"Except for a sustained good humor (Leonard Shan't see

this) due to the fact that every twinge of anger is at

158

once visited upon my husband, I might still be Miss S."
Leonard did love her very much, he was protective and
comforting and She needed his affection too much to deny
herself the pleasure of it....in Spite of the fact that
she could not return the love in kind. Hence her guilt.

The oscillation between guilt for not feeling, and
anger for having demands made upon her that she could
not fulfill, must have contributed to the worst of her
mental breakdowns, which occured shortly after her
marriage.

The double bind, the awareness of duality, the
conflict between the need to give and the needs to remain
whole, the need to feel and the fragmentation of the
self that is threatened by feeling, created a tension
which resonates throughout the novel; the energy that
pervades the book has been expended in an attempt to
control the Opposing forces within the author.

In creating her two characterS--the sane and the
insane—-Woolf deals with two aspects of her self that
compete from time to time for center stage.

Septimus Warren Smith never meets Clarissa Dalloway
outside the imagination of the reader. She is ensconced
in the most dazzling of London's society, and he is
relegated to the Shabby suburbs, the "intellectual under-
world" with no one to communicate with him if he were
capable of communicating. Why Woolf chose such widely

differing characters, and drew parallels between their

159

situationS--made them spiritual twins, but kept them
distant--might indicate that She wants those two aspects
of her self to remain forever separate.

However, in Woolf's characters--male and female, sane
and insane--we are made aware not only of the contrasting
qualitieS--which are obvious and visible to the naked
eye, but also of their very subtle likenesses, which are
not visible to the casual observer, and which we can
discover only by overbearing their thoughts.

These two passages, the one describing Mrs. Dalloway's
reverie, the other, Septimus's, establish a parallel mood.

Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her
needle drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle
pause, collected the green folds together and
attached them, very lightly to the belt. 80 on

a summer's day waves collect, over-balance, 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 the sorrows, and renews, begins, collects,
and lets fall. And the body alone listens to the
passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking.19

She imagines herself to be lying on a beach, while Septimus,

on his sofa, imagines himself at sea.

....the sound of water was in the room and through
the waves came the voices of birds Singing. Every
power poured its treasures on his head, and his
hand lay there on the back of the sofa, as he had
seen his hand lie while he was bathing, floating,
on tOp of the waves, while far away on shore he
heard dogs barking far away. Fear no more, says
the heart in the body; fear no more.

160

Here Woolf contrasts Clarissa's greater security (She
Stays On the shore) with Septimus's vulnerability (the
every-susceptible Septimus); for he is more in touch with
the fluid, living, mysterious depths, while Clarissa
prefers to rest on edges of experience.

Clarissa has carefully arranged her life SO as to
bask in its pleasures without fear of drowning. However,
She misses the ecstasy of really letting herself be borne
on the tide of her delight, of surrendering to her
pleasurable feelings.

Septimus is as sensitive and as vulnerable as a babe
whereas Clarissa is almost too well defended....she kngwg
but can barely feel the ecstasy of the passing moment.
She wants to live in the present moment so as not to lose
it forever, but that would mean surrendering herself to
the flow of her feelings....and that, She believes, is
dangerous. For a woman to surrender herself to a man
can be an extremely dangerous, perhaps deadly eXperience.

In The Voyage Out, Woolf reveals a terror that

 

sexuality can lead to death; less drastically, Mrs. Dalloway

 

suggests that a completely felt or expressed sexuality -
for a woman - leads to the death of the creative self.
This fear--which the author may or may not recognize--
might be seen in Sally Seton's fate...bright young woman,
lovable, beautiful, original, gets married, produces six
Sons, and is extinguished as a person; all her flamboyant

charm has evaporated when Clarissa meets her again.

161

Clarissa, however, while aged, has preserved her "grace
of the fairy queen” and still wields her magic sceptre.
Virginia's first two breakdowns both occurred soon
after the death of a parent. Julia Stephen died in May,
1895, and Virginia broke down the following August. From
her memoirs, we know that she could not feel her grief,
but was numb and detached--in a kind of psychic Shock.
NOt only was She unable to feel the sorrow she felt She
ought to feel, but she was expected to behave with an
outward Show of exaggerated sorrow that created an even
greater distance between herself and her real feelings.
Leslie Stephen's histronic overdone lamentation for his
wife, and the muffled mourning he forced on his unhappy
children, must have made it seem to Virginia that She
was a monster of callousness. The more She was expected
to parade a grief she could not get in touch with, the
more hypocritical, false, and monstrous She must have
seemed to herself. Thirteen years is no great age,
and Virginia, from all accounts, was somewhat less
mature even than most other children. The result was
her collapse.

When Leslie Stephen finally died, Virginia was worn
out with the ordeal of nursing him through his Slow dying,
of dealing with the solemn parade of relativeS--mostly
lacrymous and female--and of dealing with George, who
was "consoling" her for her father's illness by coming

into her bedroom every night.

162

While her Sister, Vanessa, who seems to have been
made of sterner stuff than Virginia, was "frankly delighted"
to be delivered of the burden of caring for her father,
Virginia was suddenly overwhelmed with feelings of guilt.
Her natural relief at being delivered from a heavy load
of care and responsibility and misery turned, in her mind,
to "having wished her father dead" and her imagination
"that was equipped with an accelerator but no brakes” went
charging on full speed ahead, and as She succumbed to
insomnia and exhaustion, she may have begun to believe
that her longing for his death to release them both from
suffering had caused his death. What characterized her
breakdown, according to Quentin Bell, was terrible grief
for her father, and rage against Vanessa. Since Vanessa
was delighted to be rid of her father, it could be that
Virginia was dealing with her own guilt feelings by
turning on Vanessa.

The "raptures” Septimus experiences are very like—-
or seem to be like the "raptures” Woolf experienced as
a child. She describes these as "disconnected from my
own body." The question that occurs to me is this, did
Woolf see exquisite beauty, or experience "ecstasies" or
"raptures" during her periods of madness? There is no
biographical evidence that she did; all the descriptions
of her illness, by herself and those who remember it,
describe her blinding headaches, backaches, relentless

insomnia, self-starvation, hallucinations that terrified

163

or enraged her, nothing, in fact, that could have been
in any way pleasurable. She felt, not ecstasy, but
physical and emotional agony. In creating her first

account of delirium—induced hallucinations (for The Voyage

 

923) She drew on her own experience, and Rachel's visions
are not pleasant ones. One wonders why she describes
Septimus as having visions and sensations which he
perceives as having an origin outside his own body, as
a gift, that causes him to weep from ecstasy unless She
sensed, or believed, or knew, that her deepest trouble
was somehow related to her difficulty in owning or
acknowledging her body and its feelings as legitimate.
The fascinating thing, for me, is the recognition, some-
where in Woolf's artistic self, of the connection between
the repression of her feelings, disowning part or all of
the self, and the inability to enjoy life, between being
unable to feel, and the loss of sanity.

While Clarissa has separated herself from her body's
sexual feelings, insofar as men are concerned, Septimus
has disowned his "self" altogether. His terrible guilt
prevents him from owning his own body. He takes no respons-
ibility for his feelings-~he also has no "self" with which
to oppose other's judgements of him--hence his leap when
the doctor forces his way into Septimus' room.

Septimus, the completely disowned and alienated self,
the self that is so guilty for its inability to feel grief

that he finally kills himself....that self sees humanity

164

as "ravening dogs....scouring the desert seeking whom they
can devour"....that Septimus is like Rhoda, like Rachel
in her delirium, like Woolf in her madness.

Virginia Stephen could not feel anything at her mother's
death-bed besides a desire to giggle at the sobbing nurse.
She could not feel as She "ought"....with no one to tell
her that her numbness was an indication of a grief too
great to bear, She believed herself wicked for not feeling
sorrow.

The "sins" for which Septimus condemns himself sound
very like the "sins" which tormented Virginia.

So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the
matter, except for the sin for which human
nature had condemned him to death; that he did
not feel. He had not cared when Evans was
killed; that was the worst; but all the other
crimes raised their heads and Shook their
fingers and jeered and sneered over the rail
of the bed in the early hours of the morning
at the prostrate body which lay realizing its
degradation; how he had married his wife
without loving, had lied to her; seduced
her....The verdict of human nature on such

a wretch was death.2

Sexuality is completely repulsive to Septimus. We
see Shakespeare through the eyes of a "madman" here.

How Shakespeare loathed humanity—-the putting
on of clothes, the getting of children, the
sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This
was...the message hidden in the beauty of the
words. The secret signal which one generation
passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing,
hatred, despair....Love between man and woman
was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of ‘
OOpulation was filth to him before the end.

165

Easy to dismiss, is it not? Of course only a crazy person
would read that into Shakespeare. Certainly Septimus, in
his misery, ignores the real gaiety and delight in life
that Shakespeare creates, but his interpretation is partly
true.

All literature which has been written under the influ-
ence of patriarchal religion, that is to say, all literature,
promulgates the belief that women produce only bodies, as
Opposed to men, who produce souls. The Christian religion
has stressed the filthiness of women's bodies to a morbid
degree. The extreme care with which Virginia and her
Sisters were inculcated with the feeling that they must
strive to be clean and decent must have impressed upon
Virginia that without such excessive and strenuous effort
to abstain from all impure thoughts and actions, she would
quickly descend to a state of filth and depravity. To
be made aware of the fact by her marriage that she had a
female body, one which has been described in moving and
memorable language by the most gifted poets in the world
as a sewer of carnal lust, must have been distressing in
the extreme.

Woolf, in her periods of mental breakdown, saw her
world not as cheery or Optimistic platitudes would have
it; when she was able to consider it at all, she doubtless
saw it stripped of all pretences. We know too little of
what She felt or heard or saw during her periods of

illness, there are a few tantalizing hints, but no more.

166

However, Septimus' sexual revulsion makes sense in a
number of ways. Once again, he is feeling a magnified
and distorted emotion of Clarissa's. What for her is
a "scruple” about her sexual responsiveness has become
for him something horrible and vile.

It seems apparent that Woolf's primary source of
difficulty in dealing with her feelings was that she had
been taught that certain feelings were unacceptable, and
that She Should feel Shame and guilt for having them.

That her rational, mature self grew better and better
able to handle these feelings, we know because she con—
tinued to grow and develOp as a writer and as a human
being. But that she was never fully comfortable with
her sexuality was also apparent. Some of the tremendous
force of her self-disgust in her bouts of madness can
be seen in Septimus' attitude towards sexuality, and in
his feeling that all the great authors were, at bottom,
disgusted with human filth.

Septimus' qualities are qualities he shares with
Clarissa, but to an exaggerated degree. The guilt she
feels for "failing" her husband is the guilt that drives
him to suicide.

In each, the source of guilt is an inability to feel,
in Clarissa's case, an inability to respond sexually to
her husband, which parallels Virginia's inability to

respond to Leonard and in the more drastic case, Septimus'

167

inability to feel sorrow for Evans' death is an echo of
what Virginia felt (or didn't feel) at her mother's
death-bed.

"He had married without loving her"...without feeling
anything for her, in fact, but some kind of comfort in her
presence, and that is what Clarissa feels towards Richard....
and she does feel badly about that...that She takes com-
fort in the shelter of his living presence...he shelters
her from complete loneliness and solitude, without asking
anything too much in return, perhaps asking nothing in
return, or, having been failed, he will forgive.

Septimus chooses death over a violation of his
integrity; Clarissa chooses a cloistered existence, a
rather lonely existence, in preference to what she sees
as a death of the deepest self. Clarissa's sacrifice of
her sexuality cuts her off from a great deal of pleasure
in her own body, and exacerbates her fear of death, but
she sees it as necessary to preserve her integrity; and
Septimus' decision to preserve his integrity through
suicide is the result of that kind of logic carried to
its extreme.

Clarissa--as one aspect of Woolf's sane of functioning
self, is able to comprehend other states of being--and
respect them. She is aware that she is not the last word
on the state of the world...she is aware that her reality
is not perhaps the ultimate reality...and this is a sal-

vation for her...because she is able to receive gifts of

168

insight and experience from others in a way that Septimus
is not. He feels that he is the chosen, the prOphet, the
one who has the key to the universe. He is not able to
accept the reality of another point of view. Therefore,
if for him, the world is "without meaning"...then it is
without meaning indeed.

And how does Clarissa deal with her guilt? She is
saved by the grace of Richard's love for her. It is a
gift that absolves her from having to bear the burden of
all that guilt alone. Richard forgives her. She has
”failed" him, but he does not hold it against her, he
does not exact any recompense from her. His love is a
gift freely given, and it saves Clarissa from the terrors
of utter aloneness, in which state She must have perished.
She is humble, she accepts Richard's gift with humility.
She feels that she is not entirely worthy of his love,
Since she cannot return it in kind, She feels She has
”pilfered, schemed" to get what she wants. She feels
that it is disgraceful for her to stand alone, supported
by Richard's love, and see others sink beneath the earch,
too Oppressed to go on.

While Woolf may or may not be consciously sketching
a self-portrait here, it seems safe to say that Leonard's
unswerving care and affection for her were enough to keep
her feeling safe and loved, and that without him she
might have taken Septimus' leap earlier than She did.

While She feels herself "not wholly admirable" for taking

169

the gift, we do not have to concur with the author's
Opinion of herself. Humility can be an attractive trait,
and the reader can only regret that She felt so guilty

for what was, after all, an offense against her integrity,

and nothing She could have been responsible for.

Chapter 9

To The Lighthouse

 

Worshipping Mrs. Ramsay as she does, Lily Briscoe
wonders to herself:
What art was there, known to love or
cunning . . . for becoming . . . like
waters poured into the same jar inextric-
ably the same, one with the object one
adored?
With love and cunning and art, Woolf has answered this
question.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf drew her characters into

 

herself; she took two characters, outwardly dissimilar
to herself and to each other and endowed them with
characteristics of her own. In this novel, she moves
through herself and beyond herself to embrace another
person: her mother.

Woolf touches upon the most sensitive areas in her
past, her feelings of not having had enough of her
mother's attention as a child, her anxiety that her
mother would not have fully approved of a life devoted
to artistic endeavor, rather than a husband and child-
ren, the pain of her mother's death and her subsequent
relationship to her father, and finally, the resolution
of her anguish and grief into a calm acceptance by means
of her creative gift.

170

171

To The Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of

 

her novels. In it she traces the events that Shaped
her over that course of time just prior to her mother's
death and during the ten years that followed; that time
also encompassed the deaths of her half-sister and her
brother.

In that novel one watches her retrace her past and
discover her progress from the comparative happiness
and peace of her childhood through the misery of her
adolescence (which she treats only as allegory in "Time
Passes"), to an epiphany when the mature artist
realizes that the gift of making "the moment out of
time" stand still is one that She shares with her
mother; it is not a wedge dividing them, but common
ground where the daughter can bring her mother to life
for our delight, as the mother once brought, vividly,
delight to the author's life.

Julia Stephen's death left an enormous aching void
in Virginia. Those parents who have given their child-
ren an adequate amount of love and affirmation are
those whose children usually make the best adjustment
to that parent's death. Virginia's need was far
greater than that of most children--apparently——and she
got less affection than most children receive, simply

because there wasn't enough of her mother to go around.

172

If one reads Woolf's account of her mother in the

chapter entitled "Reminiscences" in Moments of‘Beipg,

 

written when the author was about twenty-five years
old, one has the impression that Julia Stephen was
rather cold and severe with her daughters, and remote,
like a goddess. When Woolf wrote "Reminiscences,"
Julia had been dead about twelve years, and yet was
still a "presence" to her daughter.

It is perfectly true that She obsessed

me, in spite of the fact that she died

when I was thirteen, until I was forty—

four.
When she describes her mother's death, she does so in
mythic terms.

If what I have said of her has any

meaning you will believe that her death

was the greatest disaster that could

happen; it was as though on some bril-

liant day of Spring the racing clouds

of a sudden stood still, grew dark, and

massed themselves; the wind flagged, and

all creatures on earth mganed or wan-

dered seeking aimlessly.
Ceres had the power to return from the underworld; that
Woolf used such imagery may (despite her disbelief in
immortality) indicate that she could not really accept
her mother's death.

After her mother died, Virginia must have realized

that She was never going to get what she needed

and She could not afford to let her mother go.

173

When I first read TogThe Lighthouse, I read it as

a magnificent elegy to Woolf's mother, and I thought,
"What a marvelous woman Julia Stephen must have been!"
After reading more of Woolf's life, I thought, "What
a marvelous woman Virginia Woolf must have been!" She
is richly forgiving, She does not dwell on her mother's
inadequacies; indeed, she never calls them that. As
She writes of her, no buried anger obtrudes in the
mellow flow of her prose for the reader to trip on;
only if one reads carefully does the author's pain
become apparent in the graceful lines.

Your grandmother . . . was . . . ruthless

in her ways, and quite indifferent, if She

saw good, to any amount of personal suf-

fering. It was characteristic Of her to

feel that her daughter was, as she expres-

sed it, part of herself, and as a slower

and less efficient part She did not scruple

to treat her with the severity with which

She would have treated her own failings,

or to offer her up as freely as she would

have offered herself . . . when your grand-

father remarked to her upon the harshness

with which she treated Stella in comparison

with the other children who were both boys,

she gave the answer I have written.
The adjectives she uses to describe her mother are not
pleasant ones: "harsh," "ruthless," "indifferent to
any amount of personal suffering” . . . at least where
her daughter was concerned.

While she regarded it as her maternal duty to crush
any Signs of pride in her eldest daughter, Stella,

Virginia's mother was not one to encourage the

174

develOpment of any egotism in any of her female
children.

Vanessa, Virginia's elder Sister, who Showed
at an early age a rich artistic talent, was shy of
expressing her dreams or ambitions, even to her sister.

Once I saw her scrawl on a black door a

great maze of lines, with white chalk.

"When I am a famous painter--"she began,

and then turned shy and rubbed it out.

when She won the prize at her drawing

school, she hardly knew, SO Shy was She,

how to tell me, in order that I might

repeat the news at home. "They've given

me the thing-—I don't know why." "What

thing?" "0 they say I've won it--the

book--the prize you know." 5She was awk-

ward as a long-legged colt.
It would be difficult to imagine any of Virginia's
complacent brothers so uncomfortable with success, so
diffident about having to report winning a prize for
excellence that they could not bear breaking the news
to the family themselves. One suspects that Julia
Stephen would have felt compelled to deliver a little
homily upon the value of a becoming modesty to Vanessa,
had she had the audacity to proudly bear her parents
the news herself. Because She was a girl She had, in
her mother's eyes, but one destiny: marriage and
motherhood, all else was frippery.

As a very small girl, Virginia remembers Sitting

beside her mother in the evening, perhaps being read to

or just enjoying her mother's nearness. Then Julia

175

would look up and notice that her husband had something
that needed tending to.

. . . my father, Sitting reading with one

leg curled round the other, twisting his

lock of hair; "Go and take the crumb out

of his bear ," she whispers to me; and

off I trot.
That's learning her "proper role in life" literally at
her mother's knee.

Julia Stephen's attitude towards her daughter is

unhappily archetypal in patriarchal cultures. PhyliSS

Chesler, in her book Women and Madness, points out that

 

female children are always orphans. They are expected
to minister to the needs of their brothers and, more
Specifically, their fathers to provide nurturance,
support, sympathy, comfort, and are frequently seen

as rivals with their mother for his favor.

All four of Julia Stephen's sons, Gerald and
George Duckworth, and Thoby and Adrian Stephen, got
more attention than their Sisters . . . or at least,
more indulgence.

Thoby was two years (about) older than I
was. He dominated us four. He was a
clumsy little boy, very fat, bursting
through his Norfolk jacket. He was not a
fawning or ingratiating child, I imagine:
Napoleonic, one of the Aunts described
him as a baby . . . He grew very quickly
out of nursery ways, I cannot remember
him, as I can Adrian, appealing, childish
. . Thoby was a determined, resolute
little boy: whose rages were very thorough
and formidable. I see him struggling with

176

Gerald; or so truculent with the nurses

that father had to be sent for.7
It is common knowledge nowadays that children tend to
live up to their elders' expectations of them, they
also sense at a very early age which behaviors will win
them love and acceptance, and which will threaten them
with loss of love. If Thoby was a fat little boy, he
must have been allowed to eat as much as he wanted
without being reprimanded; it must have been acceptable
for him to be greedy. The relationship between food and
mother-love has been pounded almost to death, but I feel
that perhaps one reason Virginia later developed the
mental aberration known as anorexea-nervosa may have
been that She felt, deep down, unworthy of even the love
that She did get from her mother. Girls who suffer
from this disease seem to feel, pathetically, that their
mothers cannot love them, and that this is due to their
own disgusting greed. Virginia nearly managed to starve
herself to death during her bouts of madness.

Apparently it was easy to displease Julia Stephen,

if one was her daughter:

. she disliked affectation. I can

remember her saying to me: "If you hold

your head on one side like that, you Shan't

go to the party."8
It is significant that her mother's last words to her

were an admonition: "Hold yourself straight, my little

goat."

177

In Spite of the fact that Julia Stephen fero-
ciously subdued her own peace and comfort to the good
or comfort of others, She could not have been described
as a doormat (unless one could imagine a doormat
animated enough to chase one and scour one's Shoes).
Instead of having been a superior mother, She seems,
rather, to have been more of a Mother Superior; com-
pletely devoted to and worshipful of the male sex, She
saw her daughters as postulants who must be made worthy
of their future service to husbands.

Woolf writes that her mother's gallant efforts to
invest every moment of life with vitality and interest
had about them "an inimitable bravery." Her energy
didn't wane in Spite of the fact that She doubted the
ultimate value of her efforts.

You may see two things in her face. 'Let

us make the most of what we have, Since we

know nothing of the future' was the motive

that urged her to toil so incessantly on

behalf of happiness, right doing, love; and

the melancholy echoes answered 'What does

it matter? Perhaps there is no future.‘

Encompassed as She was by his solemn doubt

her most trivial activities hgd something

of grandeur about them . . ..

It is difficult to believe that a child of thirteen
or younger (even Virginia!) could have seen all that in
her mother. What is written here seems partly something

endowed in retrospect--or perhaps partly projected. This

may have been a feeling Woolf had about her own life.

178

Woolf remembered her mother as a person of immense
practical wisdom and efficiency; however she could not
or would not delegate responsibility:

"She was impetuous, and also a little imperious;
so conscious of her own burning will that She
could scarcely believe that there was not some-
thing quicker and mpae effective in her action
than in another's.
In the first memoir, Woolf's mother emerges as rather
a martinet . . . and so she may have been at times.

However, strict and exacting as she was with her
daughters, Julia Stephen also created a sense of liveli-
ness and gaity around her. The household, large as it
was, was augmented by their live-in servants, and a
constant stream of visitors. While there was never any
privacy, there was also never a dull moment. It must
have been a veritable circus of emotions, with always
some little drama for a child to observe or participate
in.

Julia herself set high standards, and Virginia
writes that she experienced a glow of pride and pleasure
when she made her laugh. While she was not an educated
women, she was extremely quick, witty, and intelligent."
She had a sensitive ear for language.

she gave a jump, I remember, when
reading Hamlet aloud to her I misread
'sliver' 'Silver'--she jumped as my father

jumped at a false quantity when we read
Virgil with him.

179

Julia was an interesting conversationalist, and
apparently an entertaining person to listen to.

It had Often occured to me to regret that
no one ever wrote down her sayings and her
vivid ways of speech Since She had the
gift of turning words in a manner peculiar

to her . . . striking out in a phrase or
two pictures of all the peOple who came
past here.

Woolf herself was never entirely at ease in a group
until She finally acquired the reputation of being a
literary "lioness;" She used her wit and malice and
brilliant imagination to awe her admirers . . . and in
that way she became somewhat like her mother. And it
was not only in the sphere of literary activity that she
saw herself as creating something permanent of the
moment . . . because those who had the privilege of
knowing her as a friend and companion valued her
sparkling conversation above any they had ever enjoyed.

Clive Bell reminisces about her:

I remember spending some dark, uneasy winter
days, during the first war in the depth of
the country with Lytton Strachey. After
lunch, as we watched the rain pour down and
premature darkness roll up, he said, in his
searching, personal way, "Loves apart, whom
would you most like to see coming up the
drive?" I hesitated a moment, and he supg
plied the answer: "Virginia of course."

At any rate, Virginia felt and expressed something
iboth of her mother and of herself in Mrs. Ramsay. As

she writes of her mother in "A Sketch of the Past":

180

one day walking around Tavistock Square
I made up, as I sometimes make up my books,
To The Lighthouse; in a great, apparently
involuntary, rush . . . I wrote the book
very quickly; and when it was written, I
ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no
longer hear her voice; I do not see her.

I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-
analysts do for their patients. I expressed
some very long felt and deeply felt emotion.
And in expressing it I explained it and then
laid it to rest. But what is the meaning of
"expressed" it? Why, because I described her
and my feeling for her in that book, Should
my vision of her and my feeling far her
become so much dimmer and weaker? 4

Although Woolf writes that her vision of her mother
and her feeling for her become much "dimmer and weaker"

after She wrote To The Lighthouse, the memories that

 

she relates in "A Sketch of the Past" are much warmer,
more colorful, and more physical ones than those She
described in "Reminiscences," perhaps because in the
process of making up her novel, she recalled memories
other than the ones which had Obsessed her, also, in
re-entering that world, if she did SO as completely as
She could re-enter her earliest memories of St. Ives,
perhaps She brought to the surface buried colors, sounds,
and happier occasions than the ones she usually had by
her. Her memories of her mother are happier, more
tender, and more understanding than they had been. She
remembers physical details that are warm and brightly

colorful.

181

Certainly there she was, in the very centre
of that great Cathedral Space which was
childhood; there she was from the very first.
My first memory is of her lap; the scratch
of some beads on her dress comes back to me
as I pressed my cheek against it. Then I
see her in her white dressing gown on the
balcony; and the passion flower with the
purple star on its petals. Her voice is
still faintly in my earS--decided, quick;
and in particular the little drops with
which her laugh ended--three diminishing

ahs . . . ”Ah--ah--ah . . ." I sometimes
end a laugh that way myself. And I see her
hands, like Adrian's, with the very indivi-
dual square-tipped fingers, each finger

with a waist to it, and the nail broadening
out. (My own are the same Size all the way,
so that I can slip a ring over my thumb.)
She had three rings; a diamond ring, an
emerald ring, and an Opal ring. My eyes used
to fix themselves upon the lights in the opal
as it moved across the page of the lesson
book when she taught us, and I was glad

that She left it to me . . . Also I hear the
tinkle of her bracelets, made of twisted
silver, given her by Mr. Lowell, as she went
about the house; especially as she came up
at night to see if we were asleep, holding

a candle shaded; this is a distinct memory,
for, like all children, I lay awake some-
times and longed for her to come. Then She
told me to think of all the lovely things 15
I could imagine. Rainbows and bells .

The pleasant memories of her mother, deeply buried
during the misery of her adolescence and mental illness,
seem to have resurfaced during the composition of her
novel. In Spite of the fact that her mother "obsessed"
her until She was forty-four, the Spectral presence may
have been strict and severe and stern, rather than tender
and forgiving. Her mother's laughter, her mother's lap,

her mother's handS-—here so well and so vividly

182

recalled-~are an indication that, as a child, Virginia
had received enough affection from her mother to make
her bitterly aware of its absence.

The novel gave her a chance to re-enter her lost
world--but freed from the subjectivity of a child--she
Slips from soul to soul and sees the world from various
perspectives.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf gave to her different

 

characters various components of her own personality,
and they looked out upon the world as she herself did
in varying moods or states of being. Now, in To The

Lighthouse, She makes a leap into another's psyche, and

 

looks out upon the world from that point of view.

The three personas of the author are represented
by Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, and Cam. However, when
Cam is in her mother's presence, we do not hear from
her, we see Cam entirely as she appears to her mother.
It is not until Mrs. Ramsay has died, and Cam is an
adolescent, that we have her perceptions presented to
us directly.

In her creation of Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf looks upon
the world of her childhood through her mother's eyes.
upon herself as a child through her mother's eyes
and when she does so, she sees that world in a very

different light. It becomes a different place from the

one she had remembered as a child.

183

When Woolf looks at herself through Mrs. Ramsay's
eyes, she sees "Cam"--a small, lively girl whose demands
for attention do not make her unlovable, but which her
mother has not always got the strength to cope with.

'Come in or go out, Cam,’ she said, knowing
that Cam was attracted only by the word
'Flounder' and that in a moment she would
fidget and fight with James as usual. Cam
Shot off. Mrs. Ramsay went on reading,
relieved, for he and James Shared the same
tastes and were comfortable together.

There seems to be something of Thoby in James, but
in reality, he was Adrian . . . the one whom Virginia
was no doubt most jealous of . . . and probably the
reason why Cam would have fought with James. For Woolf
to be able to say--in her mother's words, or mind-—"he
was the most gifted, the most sensitive of all her
children" and not make some editorial comment seems
remarkably restrained. In fact, poor Adrian had a very
hard time finding his bearings and settling on a profes-
sion. While he did not break down to the extent that
Virginia did, he was apparently subject to bouts of
severe depression, and underwent extensive psychoanalysha
Apparently, Virginia could afford to be generous for,
by that time, she has proven her gift. She was never

really fond of her younger brother. However, her

jealousy does not show through in the novel.

The device of assuming another person's point of

View is very useful for understanding his or her actions

184

and possibly even what motivates them. However, it can
be very threatening. For once one abandons one's
protective blinkers and sees oneself in the role of
object, only peripherally important to the person whose
point of view one is examining, the resulting Shock to
the ego can be very great. It is probably for this
reason that most of us avoid doing it . . . whenever
possible. Perhaps Woolf trusted that her mother's point
of view would be loving enough for her to assume it
without risk. At any rate, that is the art-—known to
love and cunning--that enables the author to become one
with the object she adores.

While there are varieties of angles from which
Mrs. Ramsay herself is studied--Auerbach calls them
"Spirits hovering between heaven and earthf‘I tend
to think they're the author's memorieS--the most
exciting prospect for Woolf was probably the one
Mrs. Ramsay surveys. That horizon was the clue to the
person her mother really was, and the clue to what her
mother thought of her youngest daughter. It must have
taken great courage to honestly risk losing her pro-
tective buffer of subjectivity; it certainly took a
great deal of humility. It seems to have been worth
the risk, however, for in the long run it proved to be

healing.

185

As She comprehends how she must have appeared to
her mother, Woolf is able to fully accept the fact that
there was nothing lacking in herself that caused her
mother to give her less attention than she needed. Even
the fact that ”James" was preferred is understood
because it is clear that he and his mother share the
1 same tastes and have the same temperament. ”Cam” is
lively and fidgety, ”a wild villain" Mr. Bankes calls
her; her mother finds her lovable, but somewhat of a
handful. Perhaps she feels some real compassion for
her mother's burden by the time She reaches 43
there is the matter of physical and emotional fatigue
which the young do not even imagine can exist in the
middle-aged body.

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold
herself together, one petal closed in
another, and the whole fabric fell in
exhaustion upon itself, so that She had
only strength enough to move her finger,
in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion,
across the page . . . while there throbbed
through her, like the pulse in a spring
which has expanded to its full width and
now gently ceases to beat, the rapture
of successful creation.

Here is another tie, of course, besides the empathy
of the body; Woolf has experienced the ”rapture of
successful creation." She remembers enough of her

mother's activities and speech to recall that much of

her energy went into bolstering her husband's fragile

186

ego. It was doubtless such an ego that Woolf would be

recalling when She wrote in A Room of One's Own about

 

the vanity of men who need to believe that they are
superior by their sex alone to "half the human race."
Women, She says, have always had the magic and delicious
power of reflecting the images of men at twice their
normal Size. This is the primary function of ”The Angel
in the House”--to nurse and nurture the self-esteem Of
her husband.

While Woolf says that She strangled the "Angel in
the House" in order to write, it seems more probable
that She assimilated her. "You had your area of crea-
tive endeavor; I have mine”; she does not admonish her
mother's Shade thus in so many words, but rather draws
such subtle parallels between them that the haunting
presence is appeased, and goes to its rest.

One wonders why Woolf makes a painter Of Lily,
instead of a writer. Perhaps she did not want to seem
conspicuous. Moreover, it is easier to get the required
effects with a painter in this story: Lily has to move
quietly and exercise various strategems in order to get
the prOper combination of perspective and privacy She
needs in order to work. She struggles painfully and
visibly with her medium, and the reader can see the
progress of her painting even as the monotonous drone

of "women can't write, women can't paint" preoccupies

187

but does not paralyze her, as it would a writer. Her
work is painfully exposed to the causal, critical eye,
and one suspects Lily would almost rather have her

canvasses hung unremembered in attics than be scorned.

Lily is one aspect of her author's persona;
certainly Vanessa could not have been the template for
Lily. Lily is charming, but rather lacking in juice;
she is the archetype of the "old maid." Vanessa was,
in her sister's eyes, a statuesque Juno, a creatix.
Mother as well aS artist, She could not have recognized
any element of herself in Lily beyond the title of
"painter." Lily seems rather to be Virginia's "bogie":
a "sexless, unfeminine, dried-up old maid" producing.
art which will be ignored, discarded, or appreciated
only by the most understanding of friends.

Lily is pitied by Mrs. Ramsay, patronized by
Mrs. Ramsay, and believes herself quite misunderstood
by Mrs. Ramsay. And besides Mrs. Ramsay, Lily does seem
like a humble pawn beside a magnificent, domineering
queen. The first section of the novel explores the
attitude of each one towards the other.

Woolf examines the situation first from one point
of view, then from the other. Lily, it seems, is "in
love" with the Ramsays, especially Mrs. Ramsay. She
feels that there is some intuitive knowledge deep

within her that love, or intimacy, will reveal to her.

188

Mrs. Ramsay's certainty that "an unmarried woman has

18 Shakes Lily's confidence in

missed the best of life"
herself even as her intellect persuades her that
Mrs. Ramsay presides ". . . with immutable calm over
destinies which She completely failed to understand."19
Lily, the artist, desires unity with the mother.
However, in the first section, Lily feels that Mrs.
Ramsay merely patronizes her, does not properly value
her. But after the dinner, Mrs. Ramsay thinks:
. . comparing her with Minta . . . of the
two, Lily at forty will be better. There
was in Lily a thread of something; something
of her own which Mrs. Ramsay liked very much
indeed, but no man would, she feared.2
Woolf, through her creation of Mrs. Ramsay, obtains
her mother's blessing. It is in the third section of

To The Lighthouse that Lily finally realizes what she

 

and Mrs. Ramsay Share.

. Mrs. Ramsay saying, "Life stand still
here"; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment
something permanent (as in another sphere
Lily herself tried to make of the moment
something permanent)-—this was of the
nature of a revelation. In the midst of
chaos there was shape; this eternal passing
and flowing (She looked at the clouds going
and the leaves Shaking) was struck into
stability. Life stand still here, Mrs.
Ramsay said.

In that vision that combines past and present, She
asserts its primacy for her, this celebration of her
individual ego's unique perception of reality and inter-

pretation of it.

189

Even though Mrs. Ramsay's mode of artistic creation
touches more lives, and seems to be less "selfish" than
Lily's, Woolf shows how the dinner-party gives her
(Mrs. Ramsay) a chance to create an atmosphere of
serenity, a chance to exercise her "astonishing power"
over her guests and have them behave well towards each
other. And so they do. In spite of Mr. Bankes' rest-
less longing for his work, in spite Of Mr. Ramsay's
self-centeredness and the irreverent hilarity it
inspires in his children, in Spite of Lily's rebellious-
ness and Charles Tansley's surliness, in Spite of the
tardiness of Paul, Minta, and Nancy, the party goes
'Off well.

While it seems safe to assume that Woolf admires
the effort involved, and appreciates the determination
to be civilized, it seems also apparent that the person
who achieves the greatest benefit is Mrs. Ramsay her-
self. She reaches a kind of epiphany. It is her work
of art; it is her triumph. Even though her arrogance
about managing other people's lives knows almost no
bounds, (she totally misperceives and misunderstands
Lily's prOper destiny and the Rayley's marriage
disintegrates) she is loved, admired, forgiven, much
as a gifted artist is forgiven his or her egotism.
That She hopes to achieve a kind of immortality through

her efforts, Woolf makes plain:

190

Yes, that was done then, accomplished; and
as with all things done, became solemn. Now
one thought of it, cleared of chatter and
emotion, it seemed always to have been, only
was shown now, and so being shown, struck
everything into stability. They would, she
thought, going on again, however long they
lived, come back to this night; this moon;
this wind; this house; and to her too. It
flattered her, where she was most susceptible
of flattery, to think how, wound about in
their hearts, however long they lived she
would be woven.

By comparison with his wife, Mr. Ramsay has a
rather wooden grasp of reality, and a limited capacity
for joy. He seems somewhat masochistic in his refusal
to let himself experience happiness without tainting
it in some way (one feels he is trying superstitiously
to ward off disaster). It is a fairly common malady
for people to fear letting themselves experience
intense happiness, partly because it cannot last, and
partly because it seems to be tempting fate.
He turned from the sight of human ignorance
and human fate and the sea eating the ground
we stand on, which, had he been able to
contemplate it fixedly might have led to
something; and found consolation in trifles
so slight compared with the august them
just now before him that he was disposed to
slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as
if to be caught happy in a world of misery
was for an honest man the most despicable
Of crimes.

Even though he can grasp the tragedy of the human

Situation on an intellectual plane, he cannot grasp it

emotionally; it is all a kind of game for him, as it

is not for his wife. She lives in the world he can

191

only grasp with his imagination. For her, happiness is
a triumph; for him, it is a Sin.

"Poor little place," he murmured with a
Sigh. She heard him. He said the most
melancholy things, but she noticed that
directly he said them he always Seemed
more cheerful than usual. All this
phrase-making was a game, she thought,
for if she had said half what he said,
She would have blown her brains out by
now.

It is only in his imagination that he can grasp the fact
that human work is indeed ephemeral, that our values
are transitory.

It is only by an heroic leap of the imagination
that he can grasp the fact that it is not a matter of
much importance whether or not his books will last.

"And what are two thousand years? (asked
Mr. Ramsay ironically, staring at the
hedge). What indeed, if you look from a
mountain top down the long wastes of the
ages? The very stone one kicks with one's
foot will outlast Shakespeare."25

'And here is Mr. Ramsay again:

It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether
he wished it or not, to come out thus on

a Spit of land which the sea is slowly
eating away, and there to stand, like a
desolate seabird, alone. It was his power,
his gift, suddenly to shed all super-
fluities, to shrink and diminish so that
he looked barer and felt Sparer, even
physically, yet lost none of his inten-
sity of mind, and so to stand on his
little ledge facing the dark of human
ignorance, how we know nothing and the

sea eats away the ground we stand on--this
was his fate, his gift.26

192

Yet, in Spite of his imagination, when we seem to
be seeing something through Mr. Ramsay's eyes, nature
Slows down. When he looks at the hedge, it just Sits
there, and a pot of red geraniums is merely a pot of
red geraniums.

seeing again the urns with the

trailing red geraniums which had so
often decorated processes of thought

.27

The relationship between the way nature is portrayed
or perceived through Mr. Ramsay's eyes shows that he
really feels, if he does not believe, his universe to
be secure, unchanging. Wrapped in his wife's protective
concern, he can flagellate himself to earn even more of
her sympathy and attention. The remarkable thing is
that Woolf can Show this behavior on his part without
despising him for it. He absorbed the time and energy
his wife would have done better to Spend on her
children.

In the third section, Mr. Ramsay's own perceptions
are available to us only through his actions and through
what his children imagine his perceptions to be. They
find him, as did Lily Briscoe, theatrically self-pitying,
parading his grief for sympathy, and they find this
intolerable. Near the end Of the story he has an
Opportunity to indulge this ungallant and unbecoming

impulse but he refrains and does not quote William Cowper

193

as their boat passes over the spot where the sailors
were drowned. Rather than allude to his own "rougher
seas”

. . . all he said was "Ah" as if he thought
to himself, But why make a fuss about that?
Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but

it is a perfectly straightforward affair,

and the depths of the sea (he sprinkled the
crumbs from his sandwich paper over them) are
only water after all.

If for him, "water is only water after all," for
Cam it is much more:

One could hear the slap of the water and the

patter of the falling drops and a kind of

hushing and hissing sound from the waves

rolling and gambolling and slapping the rocks

as if they were wild creatures who were per-

fectly free and tossed and tumbled and

sported like this forever.

Mr. Ramsay draws himself up to his full height by the
end of their journey, both literally and figuratively.
He rose and stood in the bow of the boat,
very straight and tall, for all the world,

James thought, as if he were saying, "There
is no God," and Cam Bhought, as if he were

leaping into space.
Mrs. Ramsay's leap from the safety of dogma to the
uncertainty of atheism is a daring one, for it leaves
him cold and comfortless in an eternity where he really
does not have anyone to console him for his loss or to
pity him for his grief. It is also an example for his

children; he frees them to work out their own relation-

ship to reality.

194

Virginia's portrait of Mr. Ramsay is a generously
retouched picture of her father. In the amusing scene
with Lily, when he poses and groans and parades his
grief, the reader tends to giggle nervously and iden—
tify with Lily: what, after all, can one say or do for
such a man? His aching need for pity makes him seem
rather harmless and faintly ridiculous. Is it with
scenes like that that his children's Spirits were
"subdued and coerced?" Not, apparently, according to
”A Sketch of the Past.”

. the horror of Wednesday. On that day
the weekly books were shown him. If they
were over eleven pounds, that lunch was a
torture. The books were presented. Silence.
He was putting on his glasses. He had read
the figures. Down came his fist on the
account book, There was a roar. His vein
filled. His face flushed, Then he shouted
"I am ruined." Then he beat his breast.
He went through an extraordinary dramatiza-
tion of self-pity, anger and despair
Never have I felt such rage and such
frustration. For not a werd of my feeling
could be expressed.3
It was not, surely, Virginia's lack of ability to
express herself that kept her Silent. Both Mr. Ramsay
and Mr. Stephen threw things when they lost their
tempers. Virginia never hints that things got worse
than that. But if Leslie Stephen felt free to indulge

in an unrestrained temper tantrum over the high cost

of beef and milk, it is appalling to think what his

195

reaction might have been to an Open and candid
appraisal of his behavior from his youngest daughter.

By the time she writes To The Lighthouse, She has

 

come far enough, climbed high enough, to regard him
with affection and amusement and pity. And by the time
she writes "A Sketch of the Past," she analyzes him
skillfully:
the fact does seem to be that at the
age of sixty—five he was almost completely
isolated, imprisoned. Whole tracts of his
sensibility had atrOphied. He had so ignored,
or refused to face, or disguised his own
feelings, that not only had he no concep-
tion of what he himself did and said; he
had no idea what other people felt. Hence
the horror and the terror of these violent
displays of rage, They were Sinister, blind,
animal, savage. He did not realize what he
did. No one could enlighten him . . . 32
There was no possibility of communication.

There was, of course, much that was good and wise
and generous in her father's character; she remembers
that when She wanted him to go fishing with them, he
replied: "'I don't like to see fish caught; SO I Shan't
come; but you can go if you like.’ I think it was very
admirably done. Not a rebuke, not a forbidding; Simply
a statement; about which I could think and decide for

myself."33

Moreover, Leslie Stephen allowed Virginia
the free choice of his library, and with a large-minded-
ness, which was entirely unVictorian, did not attempt
to keep her away from "unsuitable" reading. Had he been

younger, more in touch with his own and others' human

196

feelings, or even been less deaf, Virginia's adolescence
might have been a much happier one. For, according to
her, the real tragedy of her mother's death was not that
poignant loss and its real, sharp pain: it was the
unreal and artificial world of stuffy, claustrOphobic,
muffled mourning they entered as a result. Whatever
solace Julia's children might have found in continuing
life as well as they could was denied them. They had
to pretend that they too, would rather be dead than
alive, with the result that Virginia, at least, tried

to bring it Off.

Chapter 10

The Waves

 

The Waves seems to quiver with rainbow fires,

 

tremulous lights that flash from some translucent shape
which shifts with every breath. The boundaries, the
containers of this flow of lucent prose are never made
completely visible.

In The Waves, context has all but disappeared. We

 

are led through six different lives, but we are led as
the blind. We are completely dependent upon the speaker's
voice. We have no other authority; we must take his

or her word for the verity of the reality described. We
are never given an "objective" point of reference from
which we can gage the accuracy of the speaker's version
of reality. Usually one can examine character by over-
bearing a dialogue, or observing that character in
action. There is no "action” in the story, except
reported action, and there is no dialogue. Even when
the Speakers say they are sitting together in company,
they are not addressing each other; each addresses the
reader directly, as in a solioquy. Each one Of the six
speakers has a slightly different evaluation of any
particular occurrence, but none of them really evaluates
himself or herself much differently from the way the

197

198

others evaluate him. Woolf called The Waves a ”mystical,

 

eyeless" book, and indeed, the reader does feel "eye-
less" when no intermediary in the form of a narrator,
omniscient or otherwise, comes forward to place the
occurrences of the story in any world that we can
recognize. It is true that each of the nine sections
has a prologue that describes seascape and landscape,
but it becomes immediately obvious that this is not
where the story takes place; it is allegory rather.
If the "wedge-shaped core of darkness" that
Mrs. Ramsay becomes when she is freed from the eyes Of
others were given a voice, it would Speak like the

voices in The Waves. It seems to be each surface "self"

 

that--trapped and visible in the naked light--writhes
with shame or swells with pride. Only that subterra-
nean voice that speaks from the center of the universal
"I" can go beyond Shame or pride. Alone, the soul can
slip the traces and skim distant horizons where differ-
ences seem petty and egotism futile. Woolf is writing
about the attempt to bypass the boundaries of separate
personalities in a subterranean way--by ignoring
surfaces and communicating by means of some inner core
of shared reality. However, the individual's sense of
being limitless, of surveying the universe with a
completely subjective eye, can exist only in solitude.

And it is out of a vast, unbroken Silence that the

199

subjective voices of The Waves speak to us. So, para-

 

doxically, the speakers seem to be sharing their inmost
selves with each other, even while they never address
each other directly.

While Clarissa, Septimus, Mrs. Ramsay, and Lily (to
name the most important) all communicated their thoughts
to the reader rather directly in the form of an interior

monologue, the Speakers in The Waves communicate almost

 

entirely in poetry. Jean Guiget's expression for this
mode of communication is poetic correlative.1
We hear only one Speaker at a time, and all six

speak in the same tone of voice, so the effect is that--
almost--of hearing from one single consciousness. Yet,
in Spite of the identity of tone, all Six are distin-
guishable as separate personalities. They differ in
their likes and dislikes, their concerns and fears and
desires. While Woolf certainly was not attempting to
"create character" in the traditional or conventional
sense of the word, it would be exceedingly odd, to say
the least, for her to have Bernard say something like
this if she had not intended to create Six separate
beings.

'But we are all different. The wax--the

virginal wax that coats the Spine melted

in different patches for each of us.

.... Louis was disgusted by the nature of

human flesh; Rhoda by our cruelty; Susan
could not Share; Neville wanted order;

200

Jinny love; and SO on. We suffered
terribly as we became separate bodies.’

If one argues that we are dealing with one character
instead of Six, one misses Woolf's point altogether.
Each character is circumscribed by his or her "givens,"
his or her limitations. The book is the story of their
attempt to transcend these limitations of self--espe-
cially it is about the attempt to transcend our human
finitude through communication, and through love.

While many critics seem to regard The Waves as a

 

novel that diverges from the line Of develOpment which

culminated in TO The Lighthouse, I see at least one

 

thread which can be traced through all Woolf's major

novels and that includes The Waves. That is her

 

relationship to her characters.

In The Voyage Out She was somewhat wary of them,

 

often contemptuous of (some of) them. In Jacob's ROOm

 

she seems more compassionate . . . towards the women at
least. She begins to Share her perceptions of the world
with her characters in Mrs. Dalloway, She deepens them

in To The Lighthouse, and finally, in The Waves, the

 

narrator merges with her characters. NO one stands
outside them, guiding the readers perceptions; the
characters speak for themselves.

While before, the author had regarded herself as

rather superior to the dull and insensitive masses who

201

were all unaware of the terror and absurdity of the
human condition, she has matured enough to be able to
extend a more tolerant and compassionate feeling for
those who are unable or unwilling to face the ultimate
reality of existence. She had more compassion for those
who attempt to blind themselves to their approaching
oblivion with various games. She concentrates less on
their lack of similarity to herself, and pays attention
to those things she shares with others--delight in
affection, and happiness, and living. She extends the

circle of her empathy wider and wider until in The Waves

 

She embraces even those who are quite different from
herself. She immerses herself completely in her
characters and the effect is to reveal the shared
substratum of our common humanity.

Woolf's relationship to her characters in The Waves

 

can be best explained by terming it an "I-Thou" relation-
ship. Martin Buber's description of disinterested love,
wherein one individual confronts another in all his
subjectivity and richness, and regards him not as a
means to his own end, but an end in himself, is most
illustrative of what Woolf does with character in this
novel.

This confronting of the other being as complete
subject, who is never object for his creator, endows

each character with an existence as seemingly limitless

 

 

202

as our own. These individuals who egos we briefly
inhabit seem to be as vast as ourselves, as able to leap
the boundries of the individual life. Woolf does not
judge them; these Six evaluate each other, but their
world is without reference to any reality but their own.
We enter into their reality and leave our own behind.
They do not exist as means to an end for the reader or
for the author. Even Mrs. Ramsay, as universal and
all-pervading as she seems to be, is still at times an
object, albeit a revered object. Woolf had seen in
that shadow of her mother someone whom she wished to
grasp; someone whose blessing She desired. But that
need has been laid to rest.

Now, others are apprehended as ends in themselves.

However, the characters of The Waves are best understood

 

by their relationship to each other. In spite of the
fact that their subjectivity is fully respected

fully acknowledged, they are not to be understood only
in terms of their own motifs or concerns; they are best
understood in their relationship to one another. They
help each other to define themselves, to realize them-
selves. They enrich each other by extending the gifts
of their perception and understanding. They enlarge
each other by existing in the otherS' consciousness.

They define each other's limitations but also, they

203

extend the boundries of consciousness by their shared
existence.

While I felt that it was fruitful in Mrs. Dalloway

 

and To The Lighthouse to give some biographical informa—

 

tion, not to ”explain" the novels, but rather to explain
the sense I had of necessity, or urgency behind the
author's desire to recapture some part of her past, to
transcend or transfigure it, I have no such feelings

about The Waves. Certainly Woolf has taken parts of her

 

characters from the personalities of her friends and
family, and I will indicate where I think she has done
this, but it is not, I feel, illuminating in itself to
do so. There is not much of value to be learned by
drawing such comparisons here, because there is no
sense of the author's having some strong emotion
attached to the characters' relationship to her

there is no "her." She is her characters; they are their
own author. Whereas before, one felt she had a strong
desire to come to grips with something in her past that
had troubled her, a need to embrace, with love and
understanding, something that eluded her, there is

nothing like that evident in The Waves. The tone is

 

quite disinterested. There is no sense of having to
'recapture anything, unless perhaps, life itself.
Woolf has taken parts of her friends and family and

woven them into her characters' personalities . . . some

204

seem more directly "lifted” from real life than others

Bernard seems to be Desmond McCarthy, who was both
charming and witty, a brilliant conversationalist whose
friends tried desperately to get him to write a novel,
and finally even hired a stenographer to take down his
elusive wit. Foregetful, beset by indecision, a mass of
seemingly infinite creative potential, he expended it
all in conversation and charm. He was much-beloved, but
left nothing behind.

Bernard is the spokesperson for the group insofar
as he seems the most detached, the most dispassionate,
the most easily entertained, rather than distressed, by
the vicissitudes of life. And he is the one Woolf
chooses to do the summing up at the end of the story.

Although each of the characters is treated not only
empathetically, but sympathetically, nevertheless it is
Bernard's voice, Bernard's perceptions, which seem to be
closest to those of his creator.

I would designate Bernard as the most perceptive
voice of any of Virginia Woolf's characters, not only in
comparison to the rest of the characters in TW, but
anywhere. Certainly Lily Briscoe is terribly perceptive,
as is the narrator of To The Lighthouse. But one judges
an intelligence by the questions it asks; while Lily's
question is: "Why create?," Bernard's question is the

more fundamental: "Why live?" Bernard seems to know

205

more about the nature of nature than the narrator of 29

The Lighthouse (who seems still to bear Nature a slight

 

grudge or resentment for having left her out of its
"plans”) . . . he styles it "stupid" . . . he is angry
with Susan for submitting to the "stupidity of nature."

The difference between Bernard and the rest of them

 

is his willingness to face reality . . . he reallyisees
"what habit covers."3 He sees ". . . to the bare
bottom."4 And he goes on living, he goes on making

friends and phrases, rejoicing in his "ring of light."
The poignancy of his fate is that it is he who has
always sought out someone with whom to Share the grate,
the circle hanging in its "lOOp of gold," he, who has
always "gone with his kind,” faces his death alone——
uncomforted by any companion--and unsupported by any
illusion.

Bernard, the voluable story-teller, is Woolf's
strongest self. He reveals to us her reasons for living,
at least, he seems to be the one who epitomizes her
feelings about life. He is the one in whom She places
her confidence . . . if reality is not trustworthy, then
let us "reduce it to order." If we cannot trust life
itself to give us a meaning, then it is for us to endow
life with meaning. ”Let us Oppose ourselves to this

illimitable chaos!"

206

I jumped up, I said, 'Fight.’ ‘Fight,' I
repeated. It is the effort and the struggle,
itis the perpetual warfare, it is the
shattering and the piecing together--this
is the daily battle, defeat or victory.
The trees, scattered, put on order; the
thick green of the leaves thinned itself
to a dancing light, I netted them under
with a sudden phrase, I retrieved them
from formlessness with words.

Bernard thinks to himself:
I . . . evoked to serve as Opposite to
myself the figure of Rhoda . . . always
with fear in her eyes . . . she had killed
herself. 'Wait,' I said, putting my arm
in imagination . . . through her arm .
these men are your brothers. In persauding
her I was also persuading my own soul.

Bernard seems to be Woolf's self that persuaded her
to continue to live . . . the self that rejoiced in
earthy things, beauty, warmth,-color, pleasure in
company . . . the self that lived because life was good,
the sun hot, not because there was any "purpose" to
action . . . any imprint the course of history would
take from our actions.

Rhoda and Bernard are diametrically opposing
personalities in the book; they are also the two sides
of Woolf's personality. Rhoda, who "cannot make one
moment merge with the next,"7 who craves solitude and
flees from life and finally commits suicide, seems a
more tangibly Obvious version of Woolf's most vulnerable
self than Septimus. Rhoda is the composite of all

Woolf's fears in dealing with peOple and with life; she

207

feels herself "plucked at" by indifferent glances; she
feels that even her friends are crueler than "old
torturers" because they will see her fall (into despair)
and not keep her from falling. She has no confidence
that the human race is marching forward to a brave
destiny; she sees no rational plot or design in all its
flurried activity. The human beings whose glances pin
her down are despicable: cowardly, they are too afraid
to be different to even "pin a blue feather to a hat,"8
all alike, they feared originality, daring, courage,
and tried to bend her to be like them. Fearful of being
torn to bits, she tries to mascarade as ordinary, but
dreams obsessively of oblivion. She is unable to believe
in any tomorrow; therefore, She is unable to take any
real decision in shaping her life. Rhoda has the least
confidence of any of the Six that she will find a
dwelling place in their hearts; perhaps she does not
want even that. It is she who thinks, "we place a square
upon an oblong; very little is left outside." When a
life goes out, there is nothing left but the memory of
its illumination.

Rhoda is Woolf's most vulnerable and fragile side;
her extremely tenuous sense of self is apparent in this
passage:

. I have no face. I am like the foam
that races over the beach or the moonlight

208

that falls arrowlike . . . on a Spike
of the mailed sea—holly, or a bone or
a half-eaten boat.9

Woolf, like Rhoda, recalls being unable to cross a
puddle that lay in her path. The difference is that
Rhoda's experience is supposed to happen to her when she
is in her teens; Woolf's happened when she was six or
seven-
. . in the middle, cadaverous, awful,
1ay the grey puddle in the courtyard .
I came to the puddle. I could not cross
it. Identity failed me. We are nothing,
I said, and fell. I was blown like a
feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then,
very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I
laid my hands against a brick wall. I
returned very painfully, drawing myself
back into my body ovia the grey, cadaverous
space of the puddle.
This brief reference to a Similar experience occurs in
"A Sketch of the Past."
There was the moment of the puddle in the
path, when for no reason I could discover,
everything suddenly became unreal; I was
suspended; I could not step across the
puddle; I tried to touch something .
the whole world became unreal.11
She was unable to explain her paralysis and fear,
but part of her vulnerability to events apparently lay
in the fact that she felt "she had no body" . . . her
sense of self was very imperfect and tenuous. She says
again and again, of Rhoda, that she had to "bang herself
against something hard" to bring herself back into the

body. This numbness was perhaps a defense against

209

getting hurt, but it was an unsatisfactory defense, for
it left her without a clear sense of self, of a clear
sense of diversion between the outside world and her
inside world.

Yet there are moments when the walls of the
mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed,
and I could fancy that we might blow so vast
a bubble that the sun might set and rise in
it and we might take the blue of midday and
'the black of midnight and be cast off and
escape from here and now.

Rhoda's bubble (that appears on p.331 of The Waves)

had its forerunner years ago.
Hewet proceeded to think:

"The truth of it is that one is never alone,
and one is never in company," he concluded.

"Meaning?" said Hirst.

"Meaning? 0h, something about bubbles--
auraS--what d'you call 'em? You can't see my
bubble; I can't see yours; all we see of each
other is a Speck, like the wick in the middle
of a flame. The flame goes about with uS
everywhere; it's not ourselves exactly, but
what we feel; the world is Short, or people
mainly; all kinds of people."

"A nice streaky bubble yours must be!"

said Hirst. .
”And supposing my bubble could run 1nto

someone else's bubble--”
”And they both burst?" put in Hirst.
"Then--then——then," pondered Hewet, as
if to himself, "it would be an e-- nor-- mous
world,” he said, stretching his arms to their
full width, as though even so they could
hardly clasp the billowy universe, for when
he was with Hirst he always felt unusually

sanguine and vague.

Apparently this image was one that occurred to Woolf

rather early the most striking thing about the two

quotes is the difference in the visions of possibility

210

which they reveal . . . especially considering the
settings in which the two characters find themselves.
Hewet, in EEG, is part of a novel where the characters
are not very close to each other, and are not seen as
particularly empathetic by their author. Rhoda was
created by a novelist who felt great empathy with her
characters, but Rhoda's vision is far more modest (if
that is the word) than Hewet's . . . he hOpes to merge
entirely with another personality (or even personalities);
§§g acknowledged the illusion.

The imagery that runs through Neville's speech
evokes both death and love. The love is homosexual love,
and is suggested by the testicular imagery of his first
sentence. "I see a globe hanging down against the

enormous flanks of some hill."14

This is very abstract; later on he will become more
explicit. Naked boys playing together sprawling in the
dust, or squirting each other with hoses, romp through
his thoughts. Death is his real fear and his real
obsession and the sexuality is an escape from his
awareness of this. His first lengthy speech runs thus:

. . . I heard about the dead man . . . He

was found with his throat cut. The apple-
tree leaves became fixed in the sky; the moon
glared; I was unable to lift my foot up the
stair. He was found in the gutter. His
blood gurgled down the gutter. His jowl was
white as a dead codfish. I Shall call this
stricture, this rigidity, 'death among the

211

apple-trees' forever. There were the

floating, pale-grey clouds; and the

unintelligible obstacle," I said. And

the others passed on. But we are doomed,

all of us by the apple trees, by the

1mm1t1gable tree which we cannot pass.15
Neville cannot come to terms with that horror; "The
ripple of my life was unavailing" . . . all his life he
will seek to escape the knowledge of his own death by
the attempt to lose himself in sexual passion. In the
opening sequence, his last line, "Suddenly a bee booms
in my ear, It is here; it is past"16 brings to mind
Shakespeare's line from Romeo and Juliet, "Death
hath sucked the honey of thy ‘breath" a metaphor which
compresses the themes of sexual love and early death

into one neat image. Woolf is drawing upon the power of

that image for her purpose here.

Neville's "solution” to the fear of death is eros:

I see everything--except one thing--with
complete clarity. That is my saving. That
is what gives my suffering an unceasing
excitement . . . since I am, in one respect,
deluded, since the person is always changing,
though not the desire, and I do not know in
the morning by whom I shall Sleep at night,

I am never stagnant; I rise from my worst
disasters, I turn, I change.

Even the reality of Percival's death is blunted by

sentimentality--"Come pain, bury your fangs in my
flesh . . .."18 He seeks to numb himself to the real
horror of death by wallowing in the pain. It is not who

the person really is that interests him, hence the failure

 

212

of his love, but the script, rather what function will
the person play for him? Neville seeks the awareness
of his sensuality as a narcotic against anxiety.

Neville:

We look at each other; see that we do not

know each other, stare, and go off. Such

looks are lashes. I feel the whole cruelty

and indifference of the world in them. If

he should not come I could not bear it.19
Neville's response here reminds one of Rhoda . . . yet
she fears everyone; Neville can go on because the role
is more important to him than the actor. It does not
matter who plays the part so long as he keeps to the
script Neville has designed for him . . . perhaps that
is why the actors keep moving on . . . they wish to be
regarded as separate persons and not part of Neville's
script.

Neville is probably at least part Lytton Strachey...
his homosexuality, his literary brilliance, his homeli-
neSS and oddity . . . all these would be Lytton. Louis
may be partly Leonard, though more heavily disguised.
his difference, his strangeness for Virginia stemmed
from his Jewishness; Louis is different because he is a
"colonial.” Leonard's father left his family in dire
straits, not by financial failure, but by dying.
Leonard, too, was a brilliant scholar. His exile,

however, was not to an office in Fleet Street, but to

 

213

the remotest ends of the empire. The arthritis in.
Louis' hands may be Similar to Leonard's nervous

tremour . . . which eliminated him from military service
in World War I.

Woolf believed poets to be special creatures, who,
because of their gifts, have roots which extend deeply
into the past, and who can therefore speak with authority
about the truth of the human condition. In a letter to
a young man who was starting out on such a career, she
writes, "You come of a very ancient race, so treat
yourself with respect."20

That both Louis and his author thought he had a
more noble calling than that of merchant-prince is indi-
cated by this reverie:

. .if now I shut my eyes, if I fail to

realize the meeting-place of past and pre-

sent . . . human history is defrauded of a

moment's vision. Its eye, that would see

through me, Shuts--if I sleep now, through

Slovenliness, or cowardice, burying myself

in the past, or in the dark; or acquiescei

or boast . . . Then I Shall grow bitter.
He knows he has the ability to produce something that
will add to the intellectual treasure of human culture;
he knows also that not to use it is to become envious of
those who have made use of their capacities.

Louis, in moments of detachment, can reflect:

These hard thoughts, this envy, this bitter-

ness, make no lodgement in me. I am the.
ghost of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, 1n

 

214

whose mind dreams have power, and garden

sounds when in the early morning petals

float on fathomless depths, and the birds

Sing. I dash and Sprinkle myself with the

bright waters of childhood. Its thin veil

quivers. But the cha2i2ned beast stamps and

stamps on the shore.
His self, his physical body and its function in the world
are still chained to his ambition and bitterness. Louis,
at the end of his life, has not proved to himself what
the others know about him all along; his superiority and
pre-eminence. He is still intimidated by headwaiters;
he still cannot allow himself any personal luxury. While
he dresses impressively for his public, be still retires
every night to his garret in the somber London rooftops,

and still tries to forge that clear ring of poetry, but

his life, the circumstances of life kept his whole soul

 

from concentrating on that one effort. And great art
requires a great effort.

Louis is aware of the valuelessness of the purely
material life, of its aimlessness, of its mean standards
of "success," how shoddy it is. Against the scruffy

backs of Shop-men jabbering over their wares, he sees

 

 

 

the shadows of hundreds of their predecessors from past
ages unaware, as Louis is aware, of eternity breathing
down their necks.

I see the gleaming tea-urn; the glass cases
full of pale-yellow sandwiches; the men in
round coats perched on stools at the counter;
and also behind them, eternity. It is a
stigma burnt on my quivering flesh by a

 

215

quivering flesh by a cowled man with a red-

hot iron. I see this eating-ShOp against

the packed and fluttering birds' wings,

feathered, folded, of the past.23
Yet, he cannot disdain them and their values completely.
He detests Speaking and calling attention to his accent.
Knowing the waitress to be ignorant, he cannot, neverthe—
less, Shrug off her scorn. Louis iS concentrated power,
chained by his ambition and insecurity to the conquest
of material wealth, as the "great beast," the elephant,
is chained; born to wander free, his longings are a
poet's longings. He evades his true calling to "forge
a ring of poetry like clear steel."24 The shadow that
falls on his path is the shame of his father's financial
failure. To allay that gnawing pain, and the humilia-
tion of being a colonial, never at his ease, he Spends
his energy accumulating capital.

Susan, whose "maternal passion" the author styles
both "bestial" and ”beautiful" has characteristics
undoubtedly drawn from Virginia's elder Sister. Rather,
it might be more accurate to say that Susan's character-
istics are based on Virginia's imaginative version of
her sister. Everyone who knew Virginia well remembered
her as having a penchant for making up characters for
peOple whom she hardly knew; and then behaving as if

they really were the fanciful characters She had

invented . . . or Spun, out of her ceaselessly frothing

 

 

 

216

imagination. That she did this to her family for fun or
mischief is a matter of record, too . . . although She V
probably had a clearer idea of where fact left off and
fantasy began . . . in their cases. Virginia tended to
exaggerate Vanessa's solicitude for her children. "You
would fry us all to cinders to provide an afternoon's
pleasure for Angelica!" (I don't know what brought that
on; apparently Virginia was feeling slighted.) There
is supposed to be a deliberately anti-intellectual
quality about Susan. "The only sayings I understand are
cries of love, hate, rage and pain."25 Whether this is
due to a kind of jealousy of the maternal condition, or
whether (more probably) the author's deepest sense about
motherhood is that it is incompatible with the kind of
dedication needed for intellectual endeavor, or whether
it is Simply because Woolf needed to simplify or reduce
each of her characters to his or her "essence" in order
to make it possible to easily identify each one. And
Susan's essence is her maternity. Completely rooted in
the earth, she is wild and maternal and untamable as a
cat . . . a kind of glorious earth-mother, powerful and
generative, she seems a pagan goddess and is one of
Woolf's most beautiful and unforgettable creations.

She is one of "the shadows of people one might have

been”26 highly romanticized; a self Woolf would not have

 

 

 

minded becoming, but only in her imagination. The only

217

concession to complexity is that Susan is aware of a
lack in herself; She yearns for an intelligence more
subtle than her own, a sensitivity concerned with more
ephemeral things and less tied to necessity.

One of the most remarkable things, in fact, about
these characters is that they convince us that they are
complex, many-facted, capable of speaking with great
depth and feeling about any human emotion, but to keep
them easily identifiable, Woolf has distilled their
personalities to one over-riding aura. Bernard is
sociable and talkative; Louis is morose and ambitious;
Neville is gay and romantic, or, as Bloomsbury would
have put it: a high-brow bugger; Jinny is a sensualist;
Rhoda is terrified. "Jinny" is the kind of person
Virginia envied-~especially in her youth-gay, flirta-
tious, frankly sensual, completely at ease in body and
proud of its feminine allure, She represents a mode of
being that was completely closed to her author. Unlike
Neville, she is not a romantic, she is merely amorous.

A female Don Juan, her reason for existence is solely
to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh.

Jinny, in her amorous adventures, seems most unlike
her author in her frank pursuit of physical lust. HOwever,

she shares with her a Wolfish hunger for surface fact and

information about people.

 

218

One must be quick and add facts deftly, like
toys to a tree, fixing them with a twist of
the fingers, . . . that man is a judge; and
that man is a millionaire, and that man, with
the eyeglass, Shot his governess through the
heart with an arrow when he was ten years old.
Afterwards he rode through deserts and dis-
patches, took part in revolutions and now
collects materials for a history of his
mother's family . . . That little man with

a blue chin has a right hand that is withered.
But why? We do not know.27

Woolf herself had a passion for factual information about
people, and those who remember her questions felt that
she really had a sense of being remote from other human
beings, cut off from them, and collected information
about them for the same reasons that an entymologist
collects information about butterflies. Jinny
continues, "I drop all these facts-~diamonds, withered
hands, china pots and the rest of it, as a monkey drops
nuts from its naked paws.”28

When the narrator is Jinny (a diminuative for
Virginia) She Speaks so that we can understand, tolerate,
and empathize with her point of view. This certainly
shows a largeness of Spirit in Woolf, for nothing more
remote from her mode of behavior could be imagined.

Jinny's conduct has a kind of gallantry in it; she
is not about to dissolve into passivity and self-pity,
even when she faces old age.

Little animal that I am, sucking my flanks

in and out with fear, I stand here, palpitat-

ing, trembling. But I will not be afraid.
I will bring the whip down on my flanks. I

 

219

am not a whimpering little animal making for
the shadow. It was only for a moment, catching
sight of myself before I had time to prepare
myself for the sight of myself, that I quailed
But now I Swear making deliberately in front
of the glass those slight preparations that
would equip me, I will not be afraid . . . I
am a native of this world, I follow its
banners. How could I run for Shelter when
they are so magnificently adventurous, daring,
curious, too, and strong enough in the midst
of an effort to pause and scrawl with a free
hand a joke upon the wall? . . . Let the silent
army of the dead descend. I march forward.
While it is true that Woolf does not admire Jinny's
solution to dissolution as she does Bernard's, never-
theless there is compassion and empathy for this kind
of life, even though it revolted her sensibilities.
It is in the relationship of human beings to one
another that Woolf sees the most exciting possibilities.
When two or more people can communicate, Share their
perceptions, a realm of potential far richer than that
of the single, individual consciousness is Open for
exploration. Bernard is the first to discover this.
'. . . when we Sit together, close, .
we melt into each other with phrases. We
are edged with mist. We make an unsub-
stantial territory.‘
The aura that two people create seems to Open up new
territory, where each can be more than he was alone.
Conversely, each can learn to define himself by
comparing himself with the other. Susan would like to
possess Bernard, to lay hold of him, but it is his

nature to "Slip away, making phrases." While she will

 

220

love Bernard to the end of her life, they will not
marry, because they are incompatible. But Susan,
through Bernard, is made aware of some need in herself
which her way of life will not satisfy. Her love for
Bernard may be a yearning for that part of herself which
must go unsatisfied because life is Short and its
luxuries are usually sacrificed to its necessities.

In this exchange, Neville also learns how he is
different from Bernard; he wants everything tidy and
orderly. At the end of the story, when Bernard is
summing up, he remembers that Susan's tears made him
"melt."

Neville did not melt. 'Therefore,' I

said, "I am myself, git Neville,‘ a

wonderful dlscovery.

Just as Bernard discovers that he is "not Neville"
as he scampers off (with Neville's knife) to comfort
Susan, he performs a similar service for Neville, who
finds himself exasperated by Bernard's inability to
follow something through in an orderly manner.

AS young men, Neville and Bernard wonder at the
effect each has on the other. Neville, in particular,
is ambivalent about the effect of his friend upon him.
He is aware that he needs the relationship with a
dispassionate observer; completely immersed in his own
subjectivity, he cannot be sure that the poems he has

written are meaningful to anyone besides himself. Yet

 

221

the contact is painful just because he is no longer sole
judge of himself. He is not at liberty to ignore cer-
tain facets of existence which Bernard's presence will
illuminate for him. These may be exciting; they may

also be painful. Bernard, also, is equivocal about their
meeting. He is suddenly aware of his untidiness (even
the willow tree, in Neville's presence, takes on a care-

32 Yet he

fully groomed aspect, "a combed look").
flowers in the presence of another person. His conversa-
tion bubbles up, he becomes more delightful to himself
now that he has someone whom he must entertain; he
becomes far more in company than he could ever be alone.
Yet after Neville leaves, he is still tingling with the
humiliation of being ". . . contracted by another person
into a single being."33
After Neville leaves, Bernard thinks to himself:
How grateful . . . to feel returning from the
dark corners in which they took refuge, .
those familiars, whom, with his superior force,
he drove into hiding . . . For I am more selves
than Neville thinks. We are not as Simple as
our friends would have us to meet their needs.
Yet love is Simple.
There is a constant tension between the need to be
realized, that is, made real, in company with others,
and the need to be the deepest, most extensive self one
can be . . . and that self can be realized only in
solitude. The ideal state would be to attain all that

potential, to realize all that potential in company.

222

The closest the characters come to feeling that is when
they meet in love and friendship. The tag line to
Bernard's ruminations (above) is perhaps not true in
itself, but the juxtaposition of that thought with
Bernard's recovery of solitude suggests that he is
aware that his friends can see him as more than a
limited, precisely defined, and tightly bounded creature
only when they extend to him the same generosity they
extend to themselves in solitude . . . that is, the
willingness to suSpend judgment and to avoid pinning
him to the wall with definitions. He wishes Neville to
regard him, not as a means to an end, but as an end in
himself.

The first of the two dinner-parties, before
Percival sets out for India, is a drama wherein Woolf
sets forth her vision of the possibilities and limita—
tions of human love.

The source of Percival's power is that the others
allow themselves to be magnanimous in his presence.
That each of them loves Percival is reason enough to
feel that he or she is safe from hurt in this circle,
and when he arrives, they drop their defenses and speak
freely as they did when they were children. In this
atmosphere of trust and Sharing, Bernard notes that the

centerpiece has become:

 

223

Now a seven-sided flower . . . a whole

flower to which every eye brings its

own contribution.
From this point, each one goes on to speak openly of
himself to the others, making the kind of revelation
possible only to trusted friends who are in the mood to
hear such confidences.

That is the composite flower. Each is privileged
to hear the fullest possible expression of the others'
perceptions; each one feels himself free to give and
free to accept. Finally, even this expansive and
delightful egotism ceases. Significantly, it is Rhoda,
the most fragile of them who notes how beautiful the
room has become. When she Speaks again, it is with a
sense of peace and rapture in company which She does
not Show again in the entire book.

. we undulate and eddy contentedly.
Comfort steals over us. Gold runs in our
blood . . . the heart beats in serenity,

in confidence, in some trance of well-being,
in some rapture of benignity.

This moment that they have made of Percival is one

where the love they feel for each other is made real.

Part III: Ethos

Chapter 11

Did Virginia Woolf Have
a ”PhilOSOphy of Life?"

 

 

I use the term "ethos” to define Woolf's outlook,
rather than call her fundamental system of values a
philOSOphy—-which peOple say she has not got--and indeed,
her values do conflict, if they are carried to extremes.

The paradox inherent in Woolf's outlook is that
while she maintains that one of the highest values of
human existence is the ability to look out upon the
world without preconceived notions of reality, whether
cultural or emotional, to perceive it without reference
to human purpose, and thus strip away what she calls the
"cotton wool" of accumulated meaning and perhaps get a
glimpse of "reality,” She knows full well that such an
achievement is not within the grasp of everyone, and if
it were--assuming that such a vision of the world were
not too arduous or too frightening to maintain for any
length of time--communication--upon which She also
places the very highest value--would become impossible.

In fact, "communication" seems too cold a word for

the kind of sharing of perceptions Woolf envisioned;

224

225

"communion" ... seems more appropriate. She felt that
existence unshared and uncommunicated lost its value,
for only by attempting--at least--to expand the indi-
vidual consciousness could human beings transcend their
finite condition. I would go further and say that she
believed this Sharing of self with others constituted
the only sort of immortality we can aspire to.

This tension between the individual's need to
perceive and define his own reality, and the equally
strong need to communicate experience, to be understood
and accepted, is a concern that runs through every novel

from The VOyage Out to The Waves. And while the yearning

 

 

for communion never diminishes, the realization that it
is extremely rare in any case, and impossible in any
absolute sense, grows with her over the years. For the
image of two personalities whose union might result in
"an e--nor--mous world"1 appears very early and is
echoed by Rhoda--who desperately needs acceptance and

sharing and communication--in The Waves.2

 

Woolf, in her youth, had a rather superior attitude,
and one senses in The VOyage Out that she thought a love
which never rose above conventional expression or con-
ventional forms was perhaps not worth expressing (for
the characters in The Voyage Out spend a great deal of
time on what love is, what friendship means, what human

beings are worth, after all), but as She matured, She

226

came gradually to feel that all human love and kindli-
ness is precious, and that while those who are equipped
to do so should serve as visionaries for the rest of
us, they are not necessarily better human beings than
those with more limited imaginations, if the less
imaginative have kindly dispositions.

Having said this about Woolf in her maturity, I
would hasten to add that she took no such position as a
matter of policy; She never talked about "loving man-
kind" or failed to be impatient with mediocrity or
stupidity. She demanded the same things of her intimates
that She demanded of herself: that they be alert, witty,
amusing . . . that they try to wring from life all that
it could yield. Her humanity shows forth in her art,
however.

While in her youth, especially, she tended to mock
those who were comfortably blinkered by their biases or
prejudices from comprehending just how precarious the
human condition really is; she also came to acknowledge
her need of them. They provide the cozy shelter in
which She can take refuge from time to time . . . even
if it's too confining a space in which to live. For
example, St. John Hirst, wrung out by the emotional
horrors of Rachel's death and Terence's breakdown, can
be consoled by sympathetic people in the hotel lobby,

and their sympathy is probably more soothing than their

227

empathy would be. Clarissa can find shelter in the
limited universe of her husband, and Bernard says,
"What a sense of the tolerableness of life the lights
in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers give us.”3 Woolf
herself wondered (in her diary) why she felt such pity
for humanity when most of them seemed on the whole to
be busy, cheerful, content. While it cannot be denied
that her outlook is elitist, it is not snobbish.

Woolf certainly did have an ethic--the humanitarian
one--and I believe it distressed her not to have any
rational basis (such as a belief in a transcending
order of reality where good reigned) for it. Irony
presupposes a better world than the world one is faced
with, and tyranny of any sort roused Virginia to
sardonic fury, all the more formidable for its being so
carefully controlled. For an example, see Egggg
Guineas.

While it is true that Woolf cannot be said to have
a "system of ethics," nowhere in her writing does She
give serious credence to any but humane values. Her
beliefs about life would preclude any abuse or waste of
it, her own or others.

I have sketched out in the following pages-~very
briefly—-what I consider to be the author's strongest
ethical concern in each of the novels. Sometimes the

emphasis is on Sharing perceptions, on communication;

228

sometimes the stress is laid on the individual's task
to create and communicate meaning. To some extent she
seems to fluctuate between these concerns.

In The Voyage Out the emphasis seems to be on the

 

desire to share meaningful experience, a yearning for
understanding. But the attempt breaks down, probably
because the author perceived herself as a person so
unique and so remote from others as to be almost
unintelligible. The novel's conclusion seems to be that
we cannot hope for much more than the comfort that
ordinary sympathy and kindness can bring . . . real
communion is doomed to failure.

In Jacob's Room there is an even stronger emphasis

 

on the importance of communication. The implication is
that breakdown of communications, whether on an indivi-
dual or national scale, can lead to chaos.

In Mrs. Dalloway, she lays stress upon the problems

 

of perception and raises the question of what is the
true reality. She unites this with the problem of the
individual's need for love (Clarissa sacrifices some of
the integrity of her perceptions for the luxury of
sharing Richard's life, and having his affection).
However, Woolf is no longer content with mere kindli-
ness. She shows that it isn't enough in all cases by
depicting what happens to Septimus--who is not

understood, although he is loved.

 

229

In To The Lighthouse, she takes control of her
universe. The difference between this novel and its
predecessors is that the theme is the triumph of the
individual vision. She stresses, not what the indivi-
dual needs from others, but what the individual must do
for himself. The love in this novel is not the love
that is lacking, but the love that is freely extended.
Mrs. Ramsay's love for her family and friends, Lily's
passionate affairwith her art, the love of the
characters for their world and for each other, and the
author's love for them and for the world all combine
to create a sense of triumph and serenity in spite of
tragedy and chaos.

The Waves is a balance of these two concerns; the

 

need to realize one's existence as a solitary individual
in relation to the universe, and the need to communi-
cate—-as fully as one is able--this self to other selves.
I would almost go so far as to call it a religious book,
were it not for the fact that Woolf disbelieves in any
transcendent reality. It is the most complete expres-

sion of her belief about the human condition.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 12

The Voyage Out

The Voyage Out is a rather grim novel, dark with

 

premonitions, brooding, boredom, and troubled reflec-
tions upon the meaning of life, or the lack thereof.
Both Hewet and Mrs. Ambrose at different times state
their belief that we can hardly be certain of anything,
certainly not justice; both Helen and Terrence subscribe
to very bleak views of the human condition.

Mrs. Ambrose was not severe upon indi-
viduals so much as incredulous of the kind-
ness of destiny, fate, what happens to people
in the long run, and apt to insist that this
was generally adverse to people in prOpor-
tion as they deserved well. Even this theory
she was reagy to discard in favor of one
which made chaos triumphant, things happening
for no reason at all, and everyonegrOping
about in illusion and ignorance.1

 

 

 

This pessimistic outlook does not change during the
course of the novel; rather, the events seem to reinforce
it. However, Woolf's main question in The VOyage Out
is not if life is good--at this point she obviously
thinks it isn't--but how we are to get through it all.

Over the years, Woolf's outlook remained ironic;
whether she was humourously or bitterly ironic depended
on the circumstances of her life at the time, but always

she felt that the world was a travesty of what, in the

230

 

 

 

231

light of reason, it ought to be. However, in none of
her later novels is she as bitter-seeming as she is in
her first one.

It took Virginia Woolf a long time to recover from
the feeling that nature, "the gods," or some inhuman
force was actively seeking her out for its fury. Given
the unusually bad run of luck the Stephen family
suffered during her youth, this is quite understandable.
Her youthful sense was that she was being "singled out"
for suffering and that this suffering conferred on her
a kind of importance.

When she was young, She had some very strong
presentiments of a cosmic consciousness. She refers to
this quite explicitly in Moments of Being when she
recalls her emotions following her brother's death.

. even if it was painful, yet it meant
that the gods (as I used to phrase it) were
taking one seriously; and giving one a job
which they would not think it worthwhile
giving, say, to Meg and Imogen Booth . . .?
I had my visual way of putting it. I would
see (after Thoby's death) two great grind-
stones . . . and myself between them. I
would typify a contest between myself and
"them"--some invisible giant. I would
reason, or fancy, that if life were thus
made to kick and rear, it was, at any rate,
the real thing . . . this . . . increased my
feelings of my own importance. Not in
relation to human beings: in relation to
the force which had respected me sufficiently
to make me feel what was real.2

Her sense of things seemed to be that only sensitive

and intelligent people suffer deeply, that the mass of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

232

humanity is too coarse, too dull for tragedy to leave
any mark, or to shake their belief in a beneficent
providence.

However terrifying it may be to feel oneself the
special antagonist of fate, there are consolations.
Prometheus has the kind of grandeur that even more
favored gods might envy.

When, after losing one beloved member of her family
after another, she found the blank, indifferent Sky did
not share her grief, but continued as blue and sunny as
ever, it seems understandable that she would treat the
notion of a pathetic fallacy with some bitterness and
resentment--and this is the most readily available
explanation for the austerity with which nature is

presented in The Voyage Out.

 

That philOSOphy which professed to discover in
natural phenomena evidence for supernatural wisdom or
goodness is raked backwards over the coals in this first
novel and treated disdainfully in her subsequent ones.
However much her feelings toward nature changed over the
years, the implied author of Virginia Woolf's novels
never felt that human beings could look to nature either
for evidence of divine goodness or for answers to the
human predicament.

In The Voyage Out, Woolf is battling with every

weapon at her disposal against organized religion, smug

 

 

 

 

233

adherence to convention, and the happy notion that all
things work out well for those that love God.

Her mockery of organized religions seems to have
been in defiance of thenmlevolentsupernatural force.
In fact, her very fury with conventional religion
suggests that she strongly desired some kind of logical
basis for her humanism, for her belief that human beings
Should be decent to each other.

Woolf's opinion of organized religion is not
precisely respectful. Helen Ambrose, whose opinion the
author admires, has this rather trenchant remark on the
question of her children's learning to pray: "I would

3

rather my children told lies." To continue on the

subject of religion, Woolf includes a lengthy sermon by
the Rev. Mr. Box, whose Opinion she admires no more than
she admires his appearance.

Standing in the pulpit he looked very large
and fat; the light coming in through the
greenish unstained windowglass made his face
appear smooth and white like a very large
egg. [His sermon] rambled with a kind of
amiable verbosity from one heading to
another . . . each of us, who dropping a
little word or a little deed into the great,
universe alters it; yea, it is a solemn
thought, alters it, for good or evil, not
for one instant, or in one vicinity, but
throughout the entire race, and for all
eternity.4

Without dwelling overlong on the suggestive sound
of "dropping a little word" into the vastness of the

universe, it is quite apparent that Woolf considers

 

 

 

 

 

 

234

both the man and his theme ridiculous, and his pomposity
appears almost obscene.
The question is, what did Virginia Stephen believe

in when she wrote The ngage Out? Not God, apparently,

 

nor Providence, nor the beneficence of nature--or even

in the "fundamental goodness" of human beings. At least,
she didn't seem to believe in their goodness at the
outset of the novel. One senses that she is trying very
hard to believe in their fundamental goodness; certainly
she is saying we have only each other, and that it
behooves us to try and take care of each other, but even
her most amiable relationships are shown as rather
impotent and lacking in basic understanding, the char-
acters have difficulty communicating their most important
feelings to each other, and romantic love is seen
primarily as fuel for anguish when catastrophe strikes.
While it seems fairly clear that Woolf believed that
human beings should try to take care of each other, and
be concerned about each other, because they are really
all alone in a blind and unfeeling universe, nevertheless,

she seems ambiguous and ambivalent about how much human

 

beings can do for each other . . . in other words,
perhaps the question is not: ought we to love one
another? but rather: does it matter whether or not we

love one another?

235

Just befOre starting out on his picnic, Hewet:
. wondered why on earth he had asked
these people, and what one really expected
to get from bunching human beings together
in a crowd.
'Cows,' he reflected, 'draw together in a
field; ships in a calm; and we're just the
same when we've nothing else to do. But
why do we do it?--is it to prevent ourselves
from seeing to the bottom of things'

This is a question Terence can ask, in his rather
superior way, because he is comfortable, and happy, and
in a mood to question the ordinary things in life.
'Philosophical questions are usually raised when one's
emotional energies are not being drained in some sink of
catastrophe. As a matter of fact, the novel's conclu-

sion does seem to be that the main reason human

beings "draw together" is precisely to keep from "seeing

 

to the bottom of things." That phrase will crop up
again in Bernard's thoughts: "I see to the bare bottom.
I see what habit covers."6
At the end of the novel, after Rachel's death and
Terence's apparent mental breakdown, St. John Hirst
enters the cozy warmth of the hotel and finds that:
. . the shock of the lamp-lit room,
together with the sight of so many
cheerful human beings sitting together
at their ease . . . after the long days
of strain and horror, overcame him
completely.7

Human beings are lamentably imperfect, but they have

only each other for value and comfort. Unfortunately,

236

the message we get about "love” is highly ambiguous, at
least it is ambiguous about romantic love.

Woolf's final scene suggests that we can be of
comfort to each other in a kind of dispassionate,
distant way. Attempts at intimacy are doomed to
failure, especially sexual intimacy. The only times
Rachel and Terence feel really close and united are the
times when one of them is Sleeping, and, most memorably,
Terence feels that his union with Rachel is finally
perfect when she is dead. Woolf seems to distrust
intimacy, especially the intimacy of sexual love. She
is willing to regard her fellow humans with tolerant
affection and compassion only if they don't crowd in too
closely. She finds their "otherness" intolerable, but
she also finds loneliness intolerable--she is torn
between need and mistrust.

Woolf, at the concusion of the novel, shows that
human beings can be some comfort to each other, if in a
limited way. It all depends on the situation; if you
wish to do something extraordinary or unconventional
all the cheerful, vulgar, well-meaning people in the
area will come in a body to Sit on your head; but if you
have been struck by tragedy, ordinary kindliness can be

a great comfort.

 

 

 

Chapter 13

Jacob's Room

 

The concluding pages of The Voyage Out would lead

 

us to believe that Woolf has decided in favor of human
company. However, the circumstances that lead St. John
Hirst to take comfort from his fellows are rather
extreme and terrible. Under more normal conditions,
perhaps he would find nothing to say to them. Jacob's
Room returns to the question of communication; how much
is it possible to share?
letters are venerable; and the tele-

phone valiant, for the journey is a lonely

one, and if bound together by notes and

telephones we went in company, perhaps--

who knows-—we might talk by the way.

There are numerous references to letters and letter-

writing in Jacob's Room; Betty Flanders is an indefa-

 

ticable correspondent. Fanny is despondent because she
never hears from Jacob. When he is abroad, Jacob's
letters to his mother are conspicuous for what they
don't say. The problem of communication is raised not
only in letters (the novel opens with a letter), but
also there are many scenes where the characters are
tongue-tied--usually Jacob is one of them--and things
which ought to be said don't get said.

237

 

 

238

The metaphors for natural things in Jacob's Room

 

(as I pointed out previously) are all lively, homely
ones. Many of them suggest scampering animals or
playful children. When the narrator looks at something
in nature, she relates it, not only to human activity,
but to the cheerful, happy aspects of life. There is
nothing grim or foreboding in the smiling face of the
landscape in Jacob's Room. While she does acknowledge
that it is possible to see things in this way (gloomily),
she doesn't try to make the reader feel it.

. who, save the nerve-worn and Sleepless,

or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes

on some crag above the multitude, see things

thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh?2
While she may be glancing back on her horrific exper-
ience of 1913-1915 (nerve-worn and Sleepless), it seems
that another factor may be that the war made human-crea-
ted disaster and disorder far more threatening to her
than nature's indifference . . . which may have seemed
welcome relief to hostile armies. Nature's cruelty is
far less horrible than man at war.

It seems almost as if the author--who had feared
the chilly indifference of the non-human world, and
shivered at its immensity, now feels more isolated from
human beings who lack the willingness or ability to

communicate meaningfully. She turns back toward that

indifference for healing, and reads into its beauty a

sentient, human-seeming quality.

 

 

 

239

Woolf is in the mood to enjoy the bright carnival
of life for its own sake.

But colour returns; runs up the stalks of
the grass; blows out into tulips and
crocuses; solidly stripes the tree trunks;
and fills the gauze of the air and the
grasses and pools.

The Bank of England emerges; and Monument
with its bristling head of golden hair;
the dray horses crossing London Bridge
Show grey and strawberry and iron-coloured.
There is a whir of wings as the suburban
trains rush into the terminus. And the
light mounts over the faces of all the
tall blind houses, slides through a Chink
and paints the lustrous bellying crimson
curtains; the green wineglasses; the
coffee-cups and the chairs standing askew.

Sunlight strikes in upon Shaving-glasses
and gleaming brass cans; upon all the jolly
trappings of the day; the bright, inquisi-
tive, armoured, resplendent, summers day
which has long since vanquished chaos;
which has dried the melancholy medieval
mists; drained the swamp and stood glass
and stone upon it; and equipped our brains
and bodies with such an armoury of weapons
that merely to see the flash and thrust of
limbs engaged in the conduct of daily life
is better than the old pageant of armies 3
drawn out in battle array upon the plain.

 

This last paragraph seems to be a kind of mock-heron:

 

celebration of civilization . . .. She sounds playful,
but somehow serious, when she says the ". . . summer's
day . . . has long Since vanquished chaos." The

summer's day which she refers to is the brisk, bustling
city day of London. The aspects of civilization which
Woolf finds glorious are those ordinary rites and duties

that everyday people perform; nurse—maids, merchants,

 

240

apple-vendors and lawyers all seem to her, as they keep
the wheels of commerce turning and the surface of
civility polished, more admirable than any "old pageant
of armies." The "chaos" to which she is referring is
undoubtedly the chaos which follows the collapse Of
these kindly rituals . . . as happens in war. Her
comments on war and the human beings who engineer war
are quietly bitter. The understated suffering in this
passage is easy to overlook:

Like blocks of tin soldiers the army covers

the cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops,

reels slightly this way and that, falls flat,

save that, through field-glasses, it can be

seen that one or two pieces still agitate up 4
and down like fragments of broken match-stick.

 

She deals briefly and sarcastically with those who
worship force. The gathering of statesmen who decide
in favor of war is comprised of very uninspiring
persons. While it is true that brute force rules the
affairs Of humanity, Woolf sees it as deSpicable to admire
it or promulgangit as a creed.

. by men as smoothly sculptured as the
impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. But
you will Observe that far from being padded
to rotundity his face is stiff from force of
will, and lean from the efforts of keeping
it so. When his right arm raises, all the
force in his veins flows straight from
Shoulder to finger-tips; not an ounce is
diverted into sudden impulses, sentimental
regrets, wire-drgwn distinctions. The buses
punctually stop.

241

The attributes of the soldier (usually acquired
in battle) are mocked by applying them to a policeman
directing traffic. This sarcasm is directed toward
those who believe that brute force is the vital stuff Of
life, rather than curiosity and creation . . . that the
humane arts are weak and flimsy compared to the arts of
war. Her implicit criticism of such a philOSOphy is
that it takes a great deal more restraint and self-con-
trol and self-discipline to maintain peace than it does
to break into a state of war.

Her passage is a sardonic comment on the misdirec-
tion of human energy. The "unseizable force” comes
hurtling not through the novelists' nets but through
peOple's lives because they can't manage to communicate
on matters of importance, whether on the personal or
the public level. Perhaps her implicit point is that,
if people spent more time attempting to communicate, and
less time training young men to "suffocate uncomplain-
ingly together,"6 the world would be a better place.

Perhaps the philOSOphical message of Jacob's Room
is that we should turn to the natural world with a
heightened awareness; a heightened appreciation of its
beauty. What is, finally, the message of Jacob's Room
unless it is a kind of chiding for the stupidity that
ignores the gifts of life, delight in natural beauty,

and burrows into the grubby concerns of power-seeking.

242

This joyous message (like Septimus'!) seems to be
inharmonious with the mood of irony . . . her urge to
make a comment on the war, and perhaps to make a comment
on her brother's death. These last two themes generate
a great deal of conflict, for Thoby Stephen, Virginia's
beloved elder brother, carried within his character all
the destructive dragon's teeth of the patriarchal
culture that Virginia saw as directly responsible for
war.

Perhaps the flaw of the book is that she seems to
wish that we see Jacob's life as a waste, a misdirection
of the vital flow of energy that should enrich his life
and the lives of others, and yet she does not really
establish a strong enough sense of Jacob as a really
lovable individual, so that we mourn his death and are
deeply moved by it . . . we do not suffer a sense of

loss in his death, hence our bitterest feelings are

diluted . . . we should feel that his death in war is
an outrage . . . instead, we feel no more than "tsk,
tsk . . ..”

His solemn self-importance and his unquestioning
acceptance of his pre-eminence in his society as
belonging to the natural order of things seem to be his
worst faults. He is willing to die to maintain that
order . . . he seems to be one of those about whom Russell

wrote: "People would rather die than think, and do."

Chapter 14

Mrs. Dalloway
The underlying theme of Mrs. Dallowgy seems best
expressed in one of Woolf's notable exceptions to her
rule not to discuss her work in letters. In a Christmas
letter to Gerald Brennan (who had written and asked her
about Jacob's Room) She illuminates, not only some of
her feelings about Jacob‘s Room, but also seems to be

looking ahead to what will become Mrs. Dalloway. I will

 

quote rather more than I need to, as her letter is

delightful.

You said you were very wretched, didn't you?
You described your liver rotting, and how

you read all night, about the early fathers;
and then walked, and saw the dawn. But were
wretched, and tore up all you wrote, and

felt you could never, never write--and com-
pared this state Of yours with mine, which
you imagine to be secure, rooted, benevolent,
industrious--you did not say dull-~but some-
how unattainable, and I daresay, unreal. But
you must reflect that I am 40; further, every
10 years, at 20, again at 30, such agony of
different sorts possessed me that not content
with rambling and reading I did most emphat-
ically attempt to end it all; and should have
been more thankful, if by stepping on one
flagstone rather than another I could have
been annihilated where I stood. I say this
partly in vanity that you may not think me
insipid; partly as a token (one of those
flying signals out of the night and so on)
that so we live, all of us who feel and
reflect, with recurring cataclysms of horror:

243

244

starting up in the night in agony. Every
ten years brings, I suppose, one of those
private orientations which match the vast
one which is, to my mind, general now in
the race. I mean, life has to be sloughed:
has to be faced: to be rejected; then
accepted on new terms with rapture. And
so on, and so on; till you are 40, when
the only problem is how to grasp it tighter
and tighter to you, so quick it seems to
slip, and so infinitely desirable is it.

Mrs. Dalloway claSps, grasps at life so intensely
that it can't breathe in her; She has to be able to
distance herself from her own immediate life, from her
fear of death, and this she does by imaginatively
experiencing Septimus' death. Awareness of one's own
approaching death is paralyzing; but awareness of death
in the abstract can be liberating.

Woolf's attitude towards Septimus' madness is
ambiguous, ambivalent, and paradoxical. Through him,
she expresses her feelings about madness and "mad"
people. On the one hand, Septimus' version of reality
is, in its clarity of perception, superior to the
perceptions of the so-called ”sane;" on the other, he
lacks the rational apparatus to interpret the extra-
ordinary powerful sensations he experiences in such a
way that he can go on living. He cannot distinguish
(for he has no boundaries between himself and the rest

of the world) between the cruelty of his own self-accusa-

tion and self-hatred and the cruelty of anonymous

245

humanity. "Human nature . . . was on him--the repulsive
brute, with the blood—red nostrils."2

We see Septimus responding to nature as if it were
conscious of him. Human beings frighten him; he cuts
himself off emotionally from everyone, including his
wife, and projects onto the natural world those emotions
which can find no outlet in relationships with humans.
He is alternately delighted and horrified by natural
phenomena. Sometimes nature soothes him; sometimes
"theyfi threaten to devour him in flames. He is over—
sensitive to all stimuli. When he sees a plane
sky-writing, he thinks:

So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are

signaling to me. Not indeed in actual words;

that is, he could not read the language yet;

but it was plain enough, this beauty, this

exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes
as he looked at the smoke words languishing
and melting in the sky and bestowing upon
him in their inexhaustible charity and
laughing goodness one shape after another

of unimaginable beauty and signalling their

intention to provide him, for nothing, for
ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more
beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks.

In her diary, Woolf wrote that Septimus'.mad
scenes made her mind "squint so badly" that she could
hardly face writing them. Yet, unlike the delirious
visions of Rachel--which were rather depressing--
Septimus' are exuberant. We are told that Septimus
went through a state of non-feeling; but when he is

presented to us he is extraordinarily sensitive to

246

stimulation. His ultimate suicide tells us that he
feels terror, horror, and ugliness with the same sharp
intensity that he perceives beauty; but apparently, for
artistic reasons, Woolf wants us to see his super-real,
super-sensitive response to natural beauty.

In this novel, unlike The Voyage Out, Woolf shows

 

the raptures of the insane; the ecstasy ordinary sights
and sounds can produce in someone who has temporarily
(through drugs) or permanently lost touch with what
most of us call reality. We are told that Septimus sees
horrors, sees the flames of hell, sees the dead walk,
but these are not described. His visions seem not only
more exciting, but more vivid and real than the world
of the sane. Septimus, during the few hours we are
acquainted with him, perceives beauty and receives
sensuous pleasure from it, with an intensity that is
overwhelming to the reader as well as to him. The
sensuous impressions of the sane characters (in compari—
son) seem to come through a pane of thick glass.

His delight in the natural beauty around him, his
sensitivity to it, is, in his author's eyes, evidence
of his superiority. Woolf, through Septimus, says,
"Look! Look around you! This is reality! This is what
it means to be alive! If you were to be buried tomorrow,
would you not weep with ecstasy and anguish for the

beauty of the world?" Although we are given to

247

understand that his reality is not "normal;" Woolf

apparently believes "much madness is divinest sense.”
On the other hand, this ecstasy stems from

Septimus' lack of definable boundaries; he seems

disembodied altogether. He, like the author in her

 

childhood, enjoys ecstasies disconnected from his own
body. Septimus believes his ecstasy to be a gift from
the gods: "they are signalling" to him. He feels that
his alternating states of joy and anguish are ordained
by heaven. Woolf, apparently, sees his belief as the
symptom of a disordered mind: this conviction that there
is a supernatural order of reason, goodness, truth,
beauty overseeing the lot of imperfect humanity. One
infers that Woolf believes it not only futile but
dangerous to imagine supernatural forces which concern
themselves with human activity . . . that way lies
madness.
As the saner half of the dyad, Clarissa also
delights in the beauty of the morning.
Such fools we are, she thought, crossing
Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows
why one loves it so, how one sees it so,
making it up, building it round one, tumbling
it, creating it every moment afresh; but the
veriest frumps . . . can't be dealt with
by Acts of Parliament for that very reason:
They love life . . . in the bellow and up—
roar . . . in the triumph and jingle and
the strange high singing of some aeroplane

overhead was what she loved; life; London;
this moment of June.4

248

Clarissa believes her delight to be irrational because
there is all that pain and suffering underneath it: the
aftermath of war, her illness, her approaching death;
yet that awareness is what sharpens her perceptions.

It was June . . . And everywhere, though it

was still so early, there was a beating, a

stirring of gaIIOping ponies, tapping of

cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and

all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft
mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which,
as the day wore on, would unwind them, and
set down on their lawns and pitches the
bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck
the ground and up they sprung, the whirling
young men, and laughing girls in their
transparent muslins who, even now, after
dancing all night, were taking their absurd

woolly dogs for a run.

It seems that perhaps both Woolf's and Clarissa's
sense of the beauty of life grows more poignant with
their awareness of death:

The sight of two coffins in the Underground
luggage office I daresay constricts all my
feelings. I have the sense of the flight
of time; and this Shores up my emotions.6

The perception that life is exquisite and fleeting
and must be enjoyed now, for it will not wait, creates
in the perceiver a sense of panic and numbness. Frantic
to lay hold of the life that remains to her, out off
from her sensual self, unable to own it without another's
permission and scorning to make such a bargain, Clarissa
is numb, frigid, wooden . . . unable to feel the pageant
that passes before her, until She confronts the

extremity of death. She has felt numb, deadened, until-

249

she imaginatively grasps the reality and finality of

Septimus' death . . . and this in its stark contrast,
frees her to feel. The desire for death is usually a
mask for an intense desire to live.

Clarissa stands alone at the end, newly aware of
her love of life, and what it is worth to her to go on
living. She is aware, through her awareness of his
sacrifice, how much life means to her . . . she
relishes it, understanding that it is all we know, all
that matters.

If there is a ”message" in this novel, perhaps it
is that we ought to love one another . . . at least to
be sensitive to one another. People cringe from
empathizing with pain, but Clarissa empathizes with
Septimus' pain and death, and it frees her; she

realizes what she has been struggling to realize the

whole day; she is alive.

 

Chapter 15

To The Lighthouse

 

In To The Lighthouse, Woolf expresses a kind of
philosophy, or rather a code, of human behavior. Inter—
spersed with the shifting and variable points of view
are several which Woolf sees as more important than the
rest. The most important perceptions are reflected in
the minds of Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, and the
narrator. From these emerge a kind of philOSOphy of
human behavior, a way of seeing the universe and of
defining human relatedness or unrelatedness to it.

Woolf extends ”artistic creation" not only to
Lily Briscoe, but also to Mrs. Ramsay, whose highly
developed social instincts and unerring tact draw out

the best in the people around her and make their brief

intercourse delightful, an occasion which they will

remember all their lives and a standard by which they

can judge the best of civility and civilization.

Woolf, is again enveloped by a sense that nature

is eternal, and humans ephemeral. There seems an even

stronger sense that time is Slipping away, but in spite

of the anxiety and tension before that feeling, there

is a sense that it is possible to make something eternal

250

251

out of ephemeral materials. In spite of the fact that
whenever nature is alluded to, the characters seem to
be measuring their own short lives against it, there is
a sense of serenity pervading the book.

When Mrs. Ramsay is busy with her household chores,
and preoccupied, the sound of the waves on the beach
seems soothing, like a "cradle song," but when:

. her mind raised itself slightly from
the task actually in hand, had no such
kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of
drums remorselessly beat the measure of
life, made one think of the destruction of
the island and its engulfment in the sea,
and warned her whose day had slipped past
in one quick doing after another that it
was all as ephemral as a rainbow--this
sound which had been obscured and con-
cealed under other sounds thundered hollow
in her ears and made her look up with an
impulse of terror.1

The stress on human temporality makes human happiness
seem more precious.

Now all the candles were lit up, and the
faces on both sides of the table were
brought nearer by the candle-light, and
composed, as they had not been in the
twilight, into a party and 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 wa-
vered and vanished, waterily. Some change
went through them all, as if . . . they
were all conscious of making a party
together in a hollow, on an island; had
their common cause against all that
fluidity out there.2

252

Here the stress is upon shared perceptions and on
communion . . . that is, loving communication. There
is nothing stable or enduring in the non-human world;
humans alone pretend that there is such a thing as
continuity. While this distorts the view of the out-
side world (rippled it so strangely) it also allows
peOple to communicate not only ideas, but values, and
to impose order. Or what seems to be order. Woolf's
point is that humankind can impose its own values on its
own world (that is, the world that each of us carries
in his head). While nature is not concerned with mercy
or justice, we can attempt to be.

She says of the mood: ". . . it partook of
eternity." It had some stability for all those present
at the table that evening would remember it. It
suggests that human civilization, in Spite of its being
woven of such gossamer tissue as good manners, kindli-
ness, and hospitality, is enduring in memory
perhaps because of its rarity. Mrs. Ramsay's exertions
are exhausting for her. It is easier to shovel manure
in the rain, where one is at least free to curse one's
lot, than to smile, and be gracious, and give another
human being one's full attention at the end of a
fatiguing day. How much easier to M3. Ramsay, who
slumps frowning-~possibly groaning--at the other end

of the table, waiting for someone to cheer him up. Yet

 

253

all that we have and are and all that is good in human
relations must depend upon the willingness to make the
effort, to be forbearing and decent to each other.
Woolf's concerns are really quite practical; her ethic
is Simply that human beings should behave well towards
each other, that they should recognize their common
cause against "all that fludity out there," against
chaos, moral chaos, Specifically. She certainly thought
we have a choice. Certainly she did not feel we are
predestined to anything. While she appreciated the fact
that all human activity, measured against the slow
turning of the stars, is inherently futile, nevertheless,
she would no doubt say with Auden, "I don't measure time
that way, nor do you."3
The dinner party is one aSpect of Mrs. Ramsay's
fullness of life . . . her creativity and her socia-
bility. The mystical experience of the lighthouse is
another. Mrs. Ramsay renews herself in solitude. She
sinks into herself when she is alone. As a "wedge-shaped
core of darkness" (which Lily Briscoe perceives to be
her essence) she can leave behind the boundries wherein
others confine her by their demands, their expectations.
Only in solitude can she replenish herself. Her husband
is sterile (figuratively, that is) and has no gift of

self to offer.

 

254

It is rather his "barrenness" that must be made
"fertile” and like the "rosy—flowered tree,” Mrs. Ramsay
gives because it is her nature to give life and suste-
nance, as a tree puts forth flowers and fruit. She is
the Tree of Life, the primordial symbol of the
mother-goddess. Beauty and warmth and nourishment are
in her being, and Mr. Ramsay drinks her almost dry.
That he has a part to play which he is either shirking
or simply incapable of performing is suggested by the
phallic symbol of the lighthouse, and the sensuously
erotic way in which the "long, steady," beams from the
lighthouse stroke and stroke Mrs. Ramsay with "silver
fingers" until:

the ecstasy burst in her eyes and
waves of pure delight raced over the floor
of her mind and She felt, It is enough!
It is enough!4
This lyrical passage portrays an orgasm of the Spirit,
a mystic's experience of rapture.

Mrs. Ramsay's receptivity to the beauty of the sea
is a metaphor for her receptivity to her own feelings.
She has no fear that she has missed anything life has
to offer. She has been filled brim-full with joy .
since she has been able to open herself to happiness,
she can confront her death without fear. Virginia Woolf

wrote that her mother said of herself that She had been

as happy and as unhappy as it was possible to be, and

 

 

255

that must be part of the source for this revelation of
Mrs. Ramsay's personality. However, it is difficult to
believe that Woolf could have written a passage like
this one without having experienced the sensations she
describes- As Woolf became more and more aware of how
life ended, she seems to have come to the realization
that the end of life is joy; that triumph consists in
letting oneself be seized by ecstasy and carried to
dizzy heights despite the danger.

In this novel, she takes control of her universe.
She claims for herself the right to define her relation-
ship to reality, and the necessity for human beings to
define themselves as humane, as having concerns which
nature takes no note of. This perception of the universe
as indifferent is liberating, for it frees the indivi-
dual from the tyranny of fear, from the foreboding that
something malevolent is waiting to destroy whatever
happiness one can attain to. Mrs. Ramsay is free to
experience ecstatic moments because She is courageous
enough to see that whether or not she suffers or
rejoices is all one to the unseeing eye of God.

In the second section, "Time Passes," Woolf seems
to be questioning the relationship of the natural world
to the human world. Again, she feels a little cheated,

a little bitter. One senses some yearing for a

 

 

256

transcendent order to manifest itself, some meaning that
would make the suffering fall into place, in a pattern.
This is perhaps the first place where Woolf deals
so bluntly and at such length with the topic of man's
relationship to the rest of the cosmos . . . and poses
the eternal questions: can the secret of human fate be
found by studying the non-human world? Is our fate
written on the wind? Can we trace our future in the
waves, or in the stars? Can we put our questions to
such oracles as birds in flight or look for answers in
the entrails of slaughtered beasts? The answer is no...
The task for human beings is to make an answer for
themselves, rather than find it . . . it is not outside
of them, but within them. The mind has powers that can
create an answer, but it takes effort.
That dream, of sharing, completing, of
finding in solitude on the beach an answer,
was then but a reflection of a mirror, and
the mirror itself was but the surface glass-
iness which forms in quiescence when the
nobler powers sleep beneath?5
As far as Woolf is concerned, there is no such
thing as an "objective relationship to reality." When
Andrew Ramsay remarks, "Think of a kitchen table
when you're not there [to see it]," he shows the
influence of his father's mind. It is Mr. Ramsay's

(and Leslie Stephen's) belief that there is a reality

whose meaning can be perceived or known apart from the

 

 

257

observer. His daughter would not deny that there is

a world apart from the world of human concerns, but she
would insist that we cannot know anything about it.
That what we really know is only the state of our mind
in the process of observing the world. However, in
Spite of the more modest claims she makes about knowing
the nature of the universe and the primacy she asserts
for the human mind, she makes a more radical demand on
the powers of the observer . . . she insists that one
face the world--insofar as this is possible--without

its gauze of history. She did not believe in ”revealed
truths" in the sense that religious minds have believed
in them, but she did believe that there was a reality
outside ordinary human perception, and that it could
shock the mind into a new understanding of the world.
She writes that the "shock . . . is a token of some real
thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting
it into words."7 This suggests, not that she has under-
stood what "objective reality" apart from the human mind
actually lg . . . but that she has divested herself of
preconceptionS-—her own or others' so that She is able
to create fresh versions of reality . . . to be receptive
to change. The most valuable thing about such epiph-
anieS--for her--was the sensation of having seen through
the "cotton wool" from the surface of the world, so

that it appeared starkly and Sharply new, seen through

 

 

258

her eyes alone, through her senses, clean and*
untarnished.

Of course, one's perceptions about one's prOper
role in life naturally will color the way the world is
perceived--and vice-versa. If the world is perceived
as static and unchanging, then it is perfectly prOper
to accept roles passed down from our predecessors--to
allow ourselves to be defined by those who have gone
before us--because they know more about the world than
we do since they have had more time to observe it.
However, if it seems that the essence of life is change
and instability--if the nature of the world cannot be
grasped or defined because it will not hold still long
enough for the observer to understand it--then we must

constantly reassess our lives and our purpose.

 

 

Chapter 16

The Waves

 

The Waves is Woolf's attempt at discovering the

 

essential truth of all human life; her attempt to reveal
what we all share. It does precisely the Opposite
thing expected of the traditional novel. Instead of
allowing uS to vicariously live another's life, to
identify with another character, it forces us to
separate ourselves from those lives it suggests, and
also from our own lives. Rather than showing us lives
which we might want or not want to live, it removes us
from particular environments, and from the necessity of
identifying with an insistant ego-bound pursuit of
something or other. This faceting of drives and ambi-
tions does not really allow us to identify with any one
of them. It makes us pause, consider, and reflect upon
the multiplicity of drives that impel us all onward.
Also, it separates impulse from action. In the normal
course of things, we tend to imagine that our goals are
the source of our energy, rather than see the goal as
an excuse for expending our energy. We tend to locate
power and energy in our goals, rather than see the goal
as a somewhat arbitrary choice (insofar as our life-en-

ergy is concerned) and the life-energy as needing some

259

 

 

260

outlet. Woolf's allegory of the wave-~of the rising
and ebbing tide--for human energy forces us to see how
our blood—pulse carries us, lifts us, not compelled
from without, but impelled from within.

Woolf, now, exhaults as well as fears the non-human
within us. The warm flesh, alive and full of energy,
delights our consciousness in its full strength, and
terrifies us as its energy dwindles and fades. The
human relationship to nature takes on the aspects of a
martyrdom. Woolf celebrates our human immersion in
nature as the church celebrates Christ's immersion in
flesh, but whereas traditional religion sees the immortal
spirit trapped in the mortal flesh, Woolf sees that
matter is eternal and our minds, ephemeral: a reverse.
Our only transcendence consists of the fact that though
we are one with material nature, we alone are capable

of—-brief1y--transcending it. The Waves is both a

 

celebration of oneness with nature and a celebration of
the human ability to transcend that nature.

Woolf believed in the human ability to transcend
our lot by sheer courage—~to be able to look dissolution
squarely in the face without cringing behind any
illusion of another, better world beyond this one. Our
immersion is the opportunity for heroism . . . it is an
occasion for greatness . . . because we may choose to

roll with the waves like Susan--to let ourselves be

 

261

borne on them, like Jinny . . . like a gull, an animal
to be scattered . . . to choose oblivion immed-

iately like Rhoda, to be willfully blind, like Neville
or to deny our singleness . . . like Louis

or finally, we can face squarely the fact of our own

dissolution, unsupported by the illusion that anyone or

anything is in control of this whirl and sift . . . and

yet go on.

The novel, or "play-poem” as Woolf called it, is
divided into nine sections, corresponding (roughly) to
one and one—half hour intervals from sunrise to sunset.
The characters enter the story as children and leave it
at the day's end as aged men and women, thus heightening
the sense of human temporality.

The Six voices speak as one. They intertwine,
they almost persuade us that they have no creator, so
completely do they dominate our perceptiOns. What
Bernard says of himself (in his summing-up) could be
Woolf speaking of herself as narrator or author.

. I ask, 'Who am I?‘ I have been talking
of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and
Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and
distinct? I do not know . . . I cannot find
any obstacle separating us. There is no
division between me and them. AS I talked
I felt, 'I am you.'1

By merging and intertwining of personalities and

perceptions, Woolf makes the point that all human beings

are one; no thought or action can be directed only

.11.. -... i. z:

 

 

262

outward, every human action is in some way directed
towards oneself. Love or hatred can be displaced,
anger can be directed towards another, but that other
is only a symbol of oneself.

Perhaps, also, the emphasis on what we share as
human beings is an attempt to transcend the pain of
impending oblivion. If one can realize that each "I"
is only part of the voice of life, that each "I" is the
same, but for accidents or particulars of inheritance
and place, then dying is not so frightening . . . "I"
will continue in another form . . . it may not be my
form, but the essential "I" will continue.

AS Bernard ruminates among the empty cups, the
leavings of a meal with a friend, he blesses his soli-
tude, it frees him from the task of being a particular
"self," a particular form different from other forms.
He is weary of living, of the struggle of living, and
if he is freed from the necessity of being an indivi-
dual, life is not so burdensome, nor death so
terrifying.

'Let me now raise my song of glory. Heaven
be praised for solitude. Let me be alone.
Let me cast and throw away this veil of
being, this cloud that changes with the
least breath, night and day, and all night
and all day. While I sat here I have been
changing. I have watched the sky change.

I have seen clouds cover the stars, then

free the stars, then cover the stars again.
Now I look at their changing no more. No

263

one sees me and I change no more. Heaven
be praised for solitude that has removed
the pressure of the eye, the solicitation
of the body, and all need of lies and
phrases.‘

But he is not allowed to sit quietly. Life is not
over yet. The head waiter comes and bustles around,
gathering up his things, forcing Bernard to resume his
individual life.

'Curse you then. However beat and done with
it all I am, I must haul myself up, and find
the particular coat that belongs to me; must
push my arms into the sleeves; must muffle
myself up against the night air and be off.
I, I, I, tired as I am, spent as I am, and
almost worn out with all this rubbing of my
nose along the surfaces of things, even I,
an elderly man who is getting rather heavy
and dislikes exertion must take myself Off
and catch some last train.3

Bernard leaves the restaurant; it is nearly dawn.
He tries to Shield himself from the dawn with reason,
tries to recover that sense of selflessness that
descended when he sat alone, faceless, and in solitude.
"There is some sense of the break of day. I will not

call it dawn."4

Bernard perceives with heartbreak that
renewal of the day does not bring any renewal for him
but the renewal of a failing struggle. The brightening
of color in the day no longer is no longer echoed by
the surging of his youthful blood, his strength. But

even without strength, he feels joy, the excitement

rising in him with the sun; he forgets his desire to be

264

done with it all and rest. He will not shield himself
from this painful ecstasy: this desire for life and yet
more life.

'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 man's, like ,
Percival's, when he gallOped in India. I
strike Spurs into my horse. Against you
will I fling myself unvanquished and un-
yielding, O Deathl'5

Bernard's triumph at the moment of his death is
that he meets it head-on, not turning away from the
terror of that encounter. He chooses full awareness
of what awaits him in the space of an instant, and
riding on the ecstasy of his challenge, full of defiance,
he has no room in him for fear or despair. Death takes

him at the crest of a breaking wave, and he dies without

knowing defeat.

 

 

Conclusion

 

Woolf's journey from 1915 to 1931 was-—artistically
and emotionally--a gradual crescendo. She enjoyed her
friends, her literary fame, her family, and the prob-
lems of the world around her did not seem severe enough
to claim her attention--at least not to the point Of
draining her creative energy. With the onset of the
depression and the rise of Hitler, Woolf began to feel
despair about the future. The books that She wrote

after The Waves are less poetic and imaginative (with

 

the exception of Between the Acts) than they are poli-
tical and polemical. While Three Guineas--damned as it
was and damned as it is--has a kind of unity, The Years
was an attempt to combine a novel with an essay, and it
became rather unwieldy. In "The Leaning Tower"--an
essay addressed to the rising generation of poets--Auden
and Spender included--Woolf says that their poetry seems
to be declaimed from a podium (I am paraphrasing) and

addressed not to an individual, but to a crowd. It was

not poetry but oratory. This same criticism could be

extended to include most of Woolf's work after 1931, if

not all of it. No single work after The Waves has the

imaginative exhilaration of her previous novels. The
short work finished just before her death, Between the

265

 

 

 

266

Aggg, is very rich, but very dark. Its imagery seems
to originate not from a sense of human possibility, but
human limitation.

The critics have accused her of being politically
insensitive to the world around her, but she was in fact
too aware of what was taking place around her to devote
herself to purely imaginative works. She possessed an
enormous range of vision, in which various political
allegiances seemed symptoms of humanity's difficulties,
rather than possible cure-alls. For that aspect
of her work she has been condemned by those to whom
political allegiances are everything.

The death of her beloved nephew, Julian Bell, in
the Spanish Civil War must have certainly undermined
her sense that the future was going to be one worth
living for.

Virginia, as she had done during her father's
terminal illness, put aside her own Shock and grief to
tend Vanessa after her son's death. Vanessa literally

collapsed from grief and was an invalid for several

months. It was largely due to Virginia's efforts that

she did not herself commit suicide.

While Virginia could not be optimistic about her

future, she continued her struggle with her present,

right up until the time of what looked to be the end of

civilization as She knew it. Moreover, at a time when

267

invasion by the German army seemed inevitable, it became
apparent that her sanity was again failing her. She
began hearing voices again, as she had before her other
breakdowns. And this time She felt that She was too old
and too tired to recover from such an ordeal.

At the outset of this study, I stated that the
reason I found Woolf so admirable was not only her
literary genius, but her personal courage. Almost
certainly, the question of her suicide will arise at
some point, perhaps as evidence that She was lacking in
sufficient courage to face another bout of madness.
While that prospect may have been enough in itself to
cause her to take her own life, there was a good deal
more to cause her distress. As Spater and Parsons point
out:

By the end of June 1940 a seemingly invin-

cible German army had conquered Poland,

Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium and

swept through northern France, driving the

British out of Dunkirk, to standlfifty

miles from the Sussex coastline.
Airraids (Rodmell was in the path of the German bombers)
continued night and day, sometimes as many as six in
twenty-four hours. Food and fuel were in short supply.
The defenders erected their pill-boxes and fences of
barbed wire around the Woolf's house. Leonard had

stored a sufficient supply of petrol in the garage for

them to commit suicide in the event that the Nazis

 

 

 

268

succeeded with their invasion. Adrian Stephen had
supplied them with lethal doses of morphia. Suicide,
then, was something that they had already considered as
preferable to what they would have to endure at the
hands of Hitler's thugs.

On March 20, l941--eight days before Virginia's
suicide--her sister wrote her a letter urging her to
take better care of herself, for:

What Shall we do when we're invaded.
if you are a helpless invalid.2

Vanessa may have later regretted her way of expressing
herself. Notice She does not say "if" but "when." In
light of the circumstances in which Virginia found
herself losing touch with reality, it does not seem
far-fetched to point out that she was sane enough to
realize that she would not only be unable to help her-
self or anyone else, but that her continued existence--
as an invalid--would be a positive danger to the lives
and welfare of those she loved most. It may be that
some could say that suicide, under any circumstances,
is a cowardly act, but in this instance, it may have
been motivated by a certain altruism. Perhaps not. At
any rate, when one considers the many ways there are to
die, one wonders why Virginia chose the way She took.

Perhaps Leonard kept the morphia under lock and key.

 

269

After writing her brief farewell to Leonard, She
went out:

. taking her walking-stick with her and

making her way across the water-meadows to

the river . . . Leaving her stick on the

bank She forced a large stone into the

pocket of her coat. Then she went to her

death, "the one experience," as she had3

said to Vita, "I shall never describe."
IS it possible that the woman who described Bernard's
last conscious moment had determined that her death
would be one she chose? Seeing death as both imminent
and inevitable, would she not prefer to meet it on her
own terms? War and madness together had flung down
the gage; she took it up and it was up to her to decide
how best to meet them.

Woolf's suicide was not the reckless waste of life
that it would have been in her youth; She was fifty-nine
years old. On the day when She walked down into the
river, even the most determined Optimist could not have
seen a cheerful option open to her . . . and Virginia
Woolf could never have been described as a determined
Optimist. She had too vivid an apprehension of all pain
and suffering for that. But that is not what we
remember her for; we remember her joyous perception of
life; for her quickening our senses to the passing
moment; for her celebration of life.

Her moments of triumph are remarkable because

there is no shadow of anguish when her characters seize

 

270

the moment in a burst of ecstasy, when they let them-
selves be carried on the crest of joy. It is true that
each knows the nature of "nothingness" and their
triumphs are more dazzling because it is in the indivi-
dual's free gift of himself to the living moment that
he triumphs over his finitude and his end. It is in
having the courage to let go of everything and fall

free that the being soars, in spite of his miserable
end, in Spite of his clay, in spite of his pain and

torment, and fear and loneliness.

B IBLIOGRAPHY

10.

11.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. 1915; rpt.

 

New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1948.

Jacob's Room. 1922; rpt.

 

 

New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959.

Mrs. Dalloway. 1925; rpt.

 

New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1953.

To The Lighthouse. 1927; rpt.

 

New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955.

The Waves. 1931; rpt.

 

New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959.

The Moment and Other Essayg.

 

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948.

A Writer's Diary. Edited by Leonard Woolf.

 

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1954.

Woolf, Virginia and Strachey, Lytton. Virginia Woolf

& Lytton Strachey: Letters. Edited‘by Leonard
Woolf and James Strachey. Hogarth Press/Chatto
& Windus, 1956; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.

Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical

Writings. Edited & with Intro. by Jeanne

Schulkind. New York and London: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. I:

 

less-1912 (Virginia Stephen). Edited by
Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann.
New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

1975.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. II;

 

1912—1922. Edited by Nigel Nicholson and
Joanne Trautmann. New York and London:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

271

12.

272

The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol.

 

1923-1928. Edited by Nigel Nicholson and
Joanne Trautmann. New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

III:

 

273

Secondary Sources

Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality
intstern Literature.“Translated byBWillard
R. Trask. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1953.

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1972.

De Beuavoir, Simone. The Second Sex. 1949.
Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York:

KnOpf, 1953.

Guiget, Jean. Virginia Woolf and Her Works.
Translated by Jean Stewart. New York:
Harcourt Brace & World, 1966. ~

Kamiya, Miyeko. "Virginia Woolf: An Outline of a
Study on her Personality, Illness, and Work."
Confinia Psychiatrica. (Tsuda College,
Kodaira, Tokyo), 8 (1965), 189-205.

Love, Jean 0. Virginia Woolf: Sources of Madness

and Art. Berkeley, LOS Angeles
London: University of California Press, 1977.

Poole, Roger. The UnknownXirginia Woolf. London
New York Melbourne: The Cambridge University

Press, 1978.

Rose, Phyllis. Woman of Letters:_A Life of
Virginia Woolf. New York: The Oxford

University Press, 1978.

Spater, George and Ian Parsons. A Marriage of
True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard

and Vir inia Woolf. New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

 

ENDNOTES

 

ENDNOTES

Introduction

1Moments of Being, p. 118.

2The Voyage Out, p. 224.

3Mrs. Dallowgy, p. 86.

4Moments of Being, p. 67.

5A Writer's Dairy, p. 70.

6Woman of Letters, p. xiii

7Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I,

8

9Ibid.

10Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf; Vol.

Jean Love. Virginia Woolf, p._220.

 

11The Unknown Virginia Woolf, p. 182.

120p. cit., pp. 182-183.

13Confinia Psychiatrica, p. 198.

14op. cit., p. 202.

15Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf, Vol.

p. 414.
II, p. 6.
II, p. 42.

 

274

 

 

1

Chapter I

The Voyoge Out

The Heart of Darkness, p. 84.

 

2

Ibid.

3

4

op.

5

Op.
6op.

7
op.

8

op.

9

op.

10

op.

11

op.

12

op.

13

Op.

14

Op.

15

op.

16

op.

17

op.

cit

cit.

'cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

’ 3

p.

p.

p.

286.

216.

326.

. 267.

33.

277.

275.

86.

The Voyage Out, p. 272.

131—132.

59.

. 91.

326.

91.

31.

 

276

op. cit., p. 264.
op. cit., pp. 210-211.
op. cit., p. 89.
op. cit., p. 87.
op. cit., p. 141.
op. cit., p. 270.
op. cit., p. 267.
op. cit., p. 211.
op. cit,, p. 82.
op. cit., p. 81.

op. cit., p. 328.

 

277

Chapter 2.

Jacob's Room

 

 

Jacob's Room, p. 7,
2op. cit., p. 7.
3op. cit., p. 13.
4Ibid.
5Ibid.
6op. cit., p 12
7op. cit., p. 132.
8op. cit., p. 52.
9op. cit., p 11.

op. cit., p. 87.

op. cit.,p. 38.

op. cit., p. 141.

op. cit., p. 98

op. cit., p 42

op. cit., pp. 17-18.

op. cit., p. 118.

op. cit., p. 148.

 

18

op. cit.

19

op. cit.

20

21

op. cit.

221bid.

23

24

op. cit.

op. cit.

op. cit.

, p. 67.

p. 65.

278

, pp. 118-119.

, p. 19.

, pp. 31-32.

, p. 173.

 

1

2

Op.

3

op.

4

op.

5

op.

6

op.

7
op.

8

op.

9

op.

10

op.

11

op.

12

op.

13

op.

14

op.

15

Op.

16

op.

17

op.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

279

Chapter 3

Mrs. Dallowgy

 

Mrs. Dalloway, p. 32.

pp. 102-103.

p.

p.

64.

99.

pp. 168-169.

p.

p.

186.

44.

170.

62.

69.

171.

45.

. 43.

. 44.

pp. 85-87.

54.

, 44.

 

18

19

20

Op. cit., p. 18.
op. cit., p. 45.

op. cit., p. 46.

280

 

 

1

281

Chapter 4

To The Lighthouse

 

To the Lighthouse, p. 23.

 

2

3

4

5

Op.

6

op.

7
op.

8

op.

9

op.

10

11

12

13

op.

14-

op.

15

op.

16

op.

17

op.

Ibid.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

A Writer's Dairy, p. 82.

To The Lighthouse, p. 192.

pp. 151-158.
, p. 160.

pp. 33-34.
p. 146.

p. 191.

9

, p. 192.
p. 193.
, pp. 192-193.

, p. 199.

p. 203.

9

 

18

19

op.

20

op.

21

Ibid.

cit.

cit.

282

, p. 199.

, pp. 201-202.

The Moment and Other Essays, p. 15.

 

22

23

24

op.

25

op.

26

op.

27

op.

28

op.

29

op.

30

op.

31

op.

32

op.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

op. cit., p. 16.

To The Lighthouse, p. 241.

, p. 279.
pp. 270—271.
p. 256.

9

, p. 255.
, p. 284.
pp. 266-267.
pp. 287—288.
p. 32.

p. 81.

 

283

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 5
The Waves
1T0 The Lighthouse, p. 147.
2 . .
A Writer's Diary, p. 143.
3The Waves, p. 332.
4 .
op. c1t., p. 362.
5 .
Op. Cit. p. 225.
6 .
op. Olt., p. 226.
7 . ,
A Writer s Dairy, p. 150.
8The Waves, p. 225.
9 .
Op. Cit. p. 278.
10op. cit. p. 194.
11op. cit. p. 227.
120p. cit. p. 258.
13Op. cit. pp 203-204.
14op. cit. p. 249.
150p. cit. p. 269-
16op. cit. p. 232.
17op. cit. p. 236-

 

18

op.

19

op.

20

op.

21

op.

22

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

9

 

23

 

24

op.

25

op.

26

op.

27

op.

28

op.

29

op.

30

op.

31

Op.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

p. 245.

p.

p.

p.

350.
330.

184.

The Waves, p. 182.

284

To The Lighthouse, pp. 97-98.

pp. 242-243.

p. 219.

p.

224.

. 266.

. 267.

377.

306.

. 279.

 

Part II: Character

Chapter 6
The Voyage Out

1 . -
Virginia WoOlf & Lytton Strachey: Letters, p.

2The voyage Out, pp. 228-229.

 

30p. cit., pp. 134—135.

4Op. cit., p. 87.

50p. cit., p. 183.

6op. cit., p. 101.

7op. cit., p. 177.

8op. cit., p. 160.

9op. cit., p. 105.

10op. cit., p. 152.

11op. cit., p. 145.

12op. cit., p. 309.

1'BMrS. Dalloway. P- 139-

l4The VOyage Out. P- 309-
15op. cit., p. 285.
160p. cit., p. 285-

17op. cit., pp. 337-338.
285

 

286

18 .

op. c1t., pp. 106-107.
19 .

op. Olt., pp. 154-155.
20 .

Op. Cit., pp. 108-109.
21Op. cit., p. 271.
221bid.

23

op. cit., p. 290.

24op. cit., 291.

25op. cit., p. 292.

26Bell, Quentin. Virginia WOolf, VOl. I, p. 209.

27op. cit., p. 211.

28The Voyage Out, p. 302.

29op. cit., p. 216.
30op. cit., p. 242.
310p. cit., p. 302.
32op. cit., p. 303.
33Ibid.

34

op. cit., p. 314.
35Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf, Vol. I, p. 143.

36The Voyage Out, p. 320.

37The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I, p. 394.

38Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf, Vol. I, pp. 185-186.

 

287

Part II: Character
Chapter 7

Jacob's Room

 

1A Writer's Diary, p. 22.

2Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2, p. 205.

30p. cit.,p. 160.

4Ibid.

5Ibid.

6Jacob's Room, p. 172.

7op. cit., pp. 10-11.

8op. cit., p. 49.

9op. cit., p. 154.

10op. cit., pp. 72-73.

11Mimesis, p. 535.

12Jacob's Room, pp. 71-72.

13op. cit., pp. 101—102.

140p, Cit°: pp. 107—109.

150p. cit., p. 75-76.

16Op. cit., p. 107.

 

cit.

cit.

cit .

cit.

cit .

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

PP-

111.

145 .

170.

32-33

151.

117.

152.

81-82 .

105 .

288

 

289

Chapter 8

Mrs. Dalloway

1Mrs. Dalloway, p. 5.

20p. cit., p. 70.

3For a complete exposition of this theory, I
found provacative but not entirely convincing, see
Roger Poole's recent work, The Unknown Virginia Woolf.

4Moments of Beingy pp. 68-69.

5The.Second Sex, p. 316.

6op. cit., p. 317.

7Moments of Beirg, pp. 68-69.

8Mrs. Dalloway, p. 259.

9Love, Jean. Virginia Woolf, p. 214.

10Moments of Beiog, p. 69.

11Op. cit., p. 130.

12The Unknown Virginia Woolf, p. 33.

13Moments of Beingy pp. 91-92.

14Mrs. Dalloway, p. 46.

151bid.

160p. cit., pp. 254—255.

290

17op. cit., pp. 46-47.

18The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II, p. 6.

19Mrs. Dallowgy, pp. 558-559.

 

2Oop. cit., p. 211.

21op. cit., pp. 137-138.

220p. cit., pp. 133-134.

Chapter 9

To The Liggthouse

1To The Lighthouse, p. 79.

2Moments of Being, p. 2.

3op. cit., p. 40.

4op. cit., p. 42. (The answer that Woolf had
written was, "She replied that it might be true; She
was hard on Stella because she felt Stella 'part of
myself'"). P. 96.

5op. cit., pp. 29-30.

6op. cit., p. 83.

7op. cit., pp. 107-108.

8op. cit., p. 82.

9op. cit., p. 36.

10op. cit., p. 39.

11op. cit., p. 86.

12op. cit., p. 36.

13Recollections of Virginia Woolf, p. 73.

14MOments‘of Beiog, p. 81.

15op. cit., pp. 81-82-

16To The Lighthouse, p. 86-

 

17op. cit., pp. 60-61.
18op. cit., p. 77.

19op. cit., p. 78.

20op. cit., pp. 156-157.
21Op. cit., p. 241.
22op. cit., p. 170.
23op. cit., pp. 69-70.
24op. cit., p. 106.
250p. cit., p. 56.

26op. cit., pp. 68-69.
27op. cit., p. 66.

280p. cit., pp. 305-306.
29op. cit., p. 307.
30op. cit., p. 308.
31MOmentS of Beiog, pp. 124-125.
32

33

op. cit., p. 126.

Op. cit., p. 116.

1393

Chapter 10

The Waves

 

l .
Virginia Woolf & Her World, pp. 285-286.

 

2The Waves, pp. 343-344.

 

3op. cit., p. 304.

4Ibid.

5Op. cit., p. 364.

6op. cit., pp. 311-312.

7op. cit., p. 265.

8op. cit., p. 317.

9op. cit., p. 265.

10op. cit., p. 219.

11Moments of Beiog, p. 78.

120p. cit., p. 331.

13The VOyage Out, pp. 108-109.

14The Waves, p. 180.

150p. cit., p. 191.

16op. cit., p. 182.

17

op.

18

op.

19

2

21

22

op.

23

op.

24

op.

25

op.

26

op.

27

op.

28

op.

29

op.

30

op.

31

op.

32

op.

33

op.

34

35

op.

36

op.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

cit.

Ibid.

cit.

cit.

, p. 265.

, p. 281.

9

9

p.

PP.

PP-

op. cit., p. 257.

Woolf, Virginia.
221.
241.
292.
266.

377.

294

0Virginia Woolf & Her World, p. 46.

The Waves, p. 220.

 

296-297.

. 298.

310-312.

115.

343.

232.

. 236.

. 263.

. 270.

Part III: Ethos

Chapter 11

Did_Virginia Woolf Have a
"PhiIOSOphy of Life?"

 

 

1The VOyage Out, p. 109.

 

2The Waves, p. 331.

 

3op. cit., p. 338.

296

Chapter 12

The Voyage Out

1The Voyage Out, p. 221.

2Moments of Being, p. 118.

3The Voyage Out, pp. 26-27.

4op. cit., p. 232.

5op. cit., p. 127.

6The Waves, p. 304.

7The Voyage Out, p. 373.

1

297

Chapter 13

Jacob's Room

 

 

Jacob's Room, p. 93.
2 .

Op. elt., p. 162.

3 .

op. Cit., p. 163.

4 .

op. c1t., pp. 155-156.
5 .

op. c1t., p. 56.
6 .

Op. c1t., p. 155.

298

Chapter 14

Mrs. Dalloway

1The Letters of’Virginia WoolfL Vol. II, pp. 598-599.

2Mrs. Dalloway, p. 139.

3Op. cit., p. 31.

4op. cit., p. 5.

5op. cit., pp. 5-6.

6A Writer's Diary, p. 56.

299

Chapter 15

To The Lighthouse

1To The Lighthouse, pp. 27-28.

2op. cit., pp. 146-147.

”,7

3The Birth of Architecture, p. 1.

4To The Lighthouse, p. 100.

5op. cit., p. 202.

6op. cit., p. 38.

7Moments of Being, p. 72.

300

Chapter 16

The Waves

1The Waves, p. 377.

20p. cit., p. 381.

3op. cit., p. 382.

4Ibid.

5op. cit., p. 383.

301

Conclusion

 

1A Marriage of The Minds, p. 181.

2op. cit., p. 183.

3

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf, Vol.

II,

 

p. 226.

 

 

 

 

"Mun!!!ES