Henry James and Virginia Woolf: The Art of Relationships

Abstract

Objections to the work of Henry James and Virginia Woolf often center about the limited range of their art: typical judgments being E. M. Forster's in Aspects of the Novel, where it is said that of human life has to disappear before [James] can do us a and Walter Allen's in The English Novel, where Woolf is seen a novelist of very narrow limits . . . . [Her characters] tend to think and feel alike, to be the aesthetes of one set of sensations. It is thought that the characters of both novelists do not experience the range of life as it is really lived; moreover, they seem to inhabit worlds in which questions of social strife, of evil and suffering, of religious doubts, of something so necessary to life as work, are ignored. It is felt generally, even by admirers, that in the novels of James and Woolf the aesthetic sensibility has so constricted life as to distort or pervert it, taking into account little of the richness and the vulgarity of ordinary life. It is not my suggestion that James and Woolf are similar in many important respects; surprisingly enough, they seem quite clearly unrelated in matters of form, since James prepares forms quite as rigorous, though not as visible, as the plots of the traditional novel, and Woolf seeks to discover along wtih her characters design in the free flux of life; thematically, James is obsessed with the moral education of pastoral creatures-princesses or Adamic vovagers from America while Woolf is concerned with the necessary though doomed attempt to forge out of daily lif a meaning that will transcend it. They are kin, however, in their creation of subjective worlds that seek to define themselves in relationship to the larger, real world, the process often bringing with it annihilation, as in Tho Voyage Out and The Wings of the Dove. They are kin, most clearly, in their use of minute psychological observations, Woolf casting about much more freely than James; and in their deliberate, unhurried, at times relentless faithfulness to these observations. What is most interesting about their art, however, is that it seems dehumanized to the ordinary reader. One cannot abstract from their words characters who are able to survive in an alien environment, as it would seem one might with other novelists-Dickens, Austen, Twain, Joyce. This apparent weakness, however, may be seen as a necessary qualification of their art.