Outside Joke: Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater and Coterie Insularity

Abstract

This essay reads Virginia Woolf’s play Freshwater as a coterie parlour theatrical, focusing on both the 1923 draft and the 1935 playscript. Scholars of both Woolf’s writings and of Bloomsbury’s coterie culture have long read the play as a modernist’s satire of the aesthetics and politics of Victorian culture. My reading challenges such a straightforward understanding of Woolf’s satire, suggesting that the play’s mockery is in fact directed inward, at Bloomsbury and at the insularity of coterie culture itself. I argue that attending to both scripts as coterie texts – i.e., texts meant for restricted consumption and production, defined by both their limited circulation and their metacommunicative capacity – recuperates these critiques, which are specific not only to Woolf’s restricted audience, but to the players for whom her roles were designed. By looking at the evolution of the play between its first 1923 draft and its 1935 performance text, too, I trace a narrative of Woolf’s disappointed hopes, one that wraps up the ‘failure’ of modernism with the failure of coterie’s queer kinship to displace the classed, heteronormative Victorian family, as well as the failure of modernism’s other social experiments to effect broader social and cultural change.