Tales of Abjection and Miscegenation: Virginia Woolf’s and Leonard Woolf’s “Jewish” Stories

Abstract

There can be no straightforward account of attitudes toward Jewishness in work of Virginia Woolf. This is woman who lived happily married to and whose private references to Leonard as Jew are marital jokes (Diary 1: 11), yet whose diaries regularly efface individual and reduce him or to an identity that is generalized and rather than unique. She reads French novel, Et Cie, Jew, not by Jean-Richard Bloch (1: 134); Roger Fry's daughter Pamela marries her Roumanian Jew, not Micu Diamand (2: 188); it is only young [who] was attacked in bed at 4 last Sunday morning by mad husband with razor, not Mrs. Sybil Starr (3: 268). Such labeling comes easily to Woolf, and even when names are ascribed, Jewish tag is quickly tied on: Bruno Walter was man whose name certainly could not easily be forgotten, but in diary record of their meeting Woolf remembers him as a swarthy, fattish, man.... Not at all 'great conductor'.... little Slav, little semitic (4: 153). Other names not quite so eminent as Walter's are prone to slip mind: whether Hinder? or Hinckel? Woolf can't remember (Dr. Rita Hinden had just left Monk's House after having tea), but in any case guest was cheap hard Jewess (5:264-65). (1) Without seeking excuses for Virginia Woolf, want to study complexities of anti-Semitism first by considering cultural and historical meanings of the Jew through psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, then by reading short story Duchess and The Jeweller in these terms, and finally by discussing an earlier short story, Three Jews, by husband Leonard. (2) am indebted in my analysis to Zygmunt Bauman's work on conceptual Jew in Modernity and Holocaust (especially chap. 2), which draws on Sartre's sense of viscosity of the Jew in Being and Nothingness; to Mary Douglas's anthropological work on cultural associations of the Jew with sliminess in Purity and Danger; and to Julia Kristeva's work on abjection, most notably in Powers of Horror. What all these writers address is formation of boundaries: What is clean and what is unclean? What is pure and what is dangerous? What is order and what is chaos? More significantly, all of them point to as that which most tellingly reveals how such social and cultural boundaries are constructed and maintained. Through sheer overdetermination of meanings ascribed to him, the Jew becomes kind of in-between that defies location, semantically overloaded entity, as Bauman puts it, comprising and blending meanings which ought to be kept apart, and for this reason natural adversary of any force concerned with drawing borderlines and keeping them watertight (39). Bauman goes on to put his case more forcefully still: I propose that has been historically construed as universal 'viscosity' of Western (40). Such statement corrects familiar interpretation of the Jew as Other, as for example in Sander Gilman's explanation: Anti-Semitism is central to Western culture because rhetoric of European culture is Christianized, even in its most secular form. This made negative image of difference of found in Gospel into central referent for all definitions of difference in West. (18-19) Gilman's understanding of the Jew as Other operates by strict bipolar model that disallows any sense of viscosity and any method that would foreground disruption of categorization rather than categories themselves. Such method--operating in terms of in-between--is practiced, for example, by Hannah Arendt in analysis of how modern anti-Semitism responds to fact that Jews were a element in world of growing or existing nations (22). (3) Social and national identities do not stick to the Jew, for which reason Arendt argues that Jews are non-national or inter-national: they are in-between. …