Woolf's Novels Research Articles

Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy by Elsa Högberg

Reviewed by: Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy by Elsa Högberg Pamela L. Caughie VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE ETHICS OF INTIMACY, by Elsa Högberg. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 234 pp. $108.00 hardback; $35.95 paperback; $28.76 ebook. Elsa Högberg's Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy is an intelligent and important book, but it is not an easy read. Its prose style is fluid, and its close readings illuminating, yet it rightly demands of the reader a theoretical sophistication and a studied attention appropriate to its subject matter. Steeped in the poststructuralist psychoanalytic theories of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Krsiteva—especially their writings from the twenty-first century that together develop what the author calls "an ethics of intimacy"—this book revises our notions of both Virginia Woolf's narrative ethics and modernist concepts of intimacy (p. 8). Högberg writes that intimacy is "a central term in the academic discourse of our century," entailing relations other than familial, sexual, erotic, or compassionate to encompass face-to-face encounters with strangers with whom one may have no emotional connection (p. 6). Such encounters in Woolf's writings render boundaries separating subject and subject, as well as subject and object, porous, creating a "vertiginous state, into which the reader is drawn" (p. 13). To remain outside that state, to retain a distinctive self and to see the other as distinct from oneself, is to engage in a sort of "ethical violence" (p. 16). In Högberg's compelling account, Woolf's modernist aesthetics, her famed exploration of "the atoms as they fall," has profound ethical implications, and it positions Woolf's writings in the "historical genealogy of thought" that extends from the modernists to the poststructuralist theorists discussed here (p. 22). Intimacy, not empathy, becomes in Woolf's art a means of resisting violence and rendering national as well as individual boundaries permeable, unstable, and thus open to reconfiguration. As Högberg forcefully declares, "It is high time that we politicise Woolf's modernist writing of interiority" (p. 28). This book shows us how this is possible, if we have the patience to work through its intricate and elegant argument. Högberg's deep familiarity and engagement with contemporary Woolf criticism provides a useful overview of the current state of Woolf scholarship, even as it insists on the continuing value of the poststructuralist [End Page 357] approaches of the later twentieth century. In the poststructuralist psychoanalytic theories of Butler, Irigaray, and Kristeva—as in Woolf's mid-career novels, Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931)—Högberg finds "a more viable model for non-violent relations" than that offered by Freudian theory (p. 21). Rather than simply reading Woolf's novels through the grid of poststructuralist theories, Högberg more usefully understands these contemporary theories as comprising "a legacy of modernist configurations of intimacy" (p. 22). That historical genealogy is made all the more evident through Högberg's close readings of Woolf's aesthetics in accordance with writings by her contemporaries, such as Roger Fry, Walter Benjamin, and Bertrand Russell, as well as contemporary theorists. Pairing novels with theorists—for example, reading the melancholic structure of Jacob's Room in relation to Kristeva's writing on melancholia, and Lily Briscoe's and Woolf's aesthetic experiments in To the Lighthouse in terms of Irigaray's notion of intimacy as entailing both nearness and "irrevocable distance"—works to illuminate both the challenging theories and Woolf's particular aesthetic concerns in each novel (p. 116). Yet the chronological progression of chapters focused on a single novel can work against a more integrated understanding of the ethical consequences of Woolf's poetic experiments. If, for example, her reading of Jacob's Room aligns it more with Woolf's late work, as the author says, then perhaps presenting that reading in close proximity to The Waves might help readers make that connection. For all its brilliance in theorizing Woolf's modernist aesthetics of interiority as a non-violent ethics aligned with a new conception of intimacy found in the recent writings of Butler, Irigaray, and Kristeva...

Things Woolfian

Things Woolfian Kat Meads (bio) Attics often give shelter to what shouldn't be preserved. Rediscovered in a crinkly, yellowed state, my dreadful 1973 term paper written for Professor Frank Ryan's honors class on the "search for unity" in Virginia Woolf's novels, nephew Quentin Bell's then-new biography my only secondary source. Throughout the thirty-two pages, Professor Ryan diligently circled my (numerous) typos: Click for larger view View full resolution —but gave up correcting the error of my block paragraph quotation marks early in the game, likely worn out by the task. On the title page, in slanting blue script, he posed these questions: Do you imply that V.W. found unity in death? Was she "ripe" and "ready for death" in a Nietzschean sense? Any relationship between V.W's art, her life and death, and Freud's Thanatos as dominant over Eros in 1930s? Did V.W. feel that England was dying in 1930s? Although I accumulated points for "handling the themes" of "male/female dichotomy," "art and its limitations," "love and its limitations," "madness," and "death," Professor Ryan signed off with another question: Could more have been done with silence?—a question time has plumped with irony. Why can't we Woolfians stop gabbing about Virginia? As early as 1974, in her essay collection Seduction and Betrayal, Elizabeth Hardwick already bemoaned Bloomsbury rehash: "The period, the letters, the houses, [End Page 135] the love affairs, the blood lines: These are private anecdotes one is happy enough to meet once or twice but not again and again." Should the reading public need reminding in 1978, that banner year for Woolf studies and publications, John Hillaby announced in a New Scientist article that "the Woolf hunt" was "still under way." In a 2015 review of Viviane Forrester's Virginia Woolf: A Portrait, reviewer Suzanne Berne used up some of her own word count to re-ask: "To the hundreds of books that have been written about Virginia Woolf, why [Berne's italics] add another? More to the point, why aren't her own books enough?" Worthy questions, both. Also questions that ignore the attractions of spectating a turf war composed of interpretive skirmishes, internecine bickerings, and revelations regarding who aligns with which side and why. As Jacqueline Rose reminded in her review of Hermione Lee's 1996 biography of Virginia Woolf, closest rival—in terms of influence—to Quentin Bell's 1972 account: "It is always worth asking of any biography, with whom in the story, if anyone, does the biographer identify?" ________ Thus far no Virginia Woolf biographer has identified with Sir Leslie Stephen—writer, scholar, expert mountaineer, Shreckhorn first-ascenter, Dictionary of National Biography editor. What's intriguing, from the biographical standpoint, is the similarity of his portrayal in books, essays, and criticism devoted to his daughter. About Sir Leslie's personality there seems to be neither undue argument nor abundant sympathy. A prickly, whiny, sulky man, often overwrought and constantly overly demanding of his family's attentions and concern. A patriarch soaked in self-pity, the perpetually weeping widower. A stepfather who deeply resented Stella Duckworth's leaving his household for marriage and a household of her own. A breadwinner "with an irrational fear of ending his days in the poorhouse," his operational standard a "melodramatic tyranny" (Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf). A fellow who excelled at enacting a "Victorian widower's hysterical helplessness" (Janet Malcolm, "A House of One's Own"). In penning the Mausoleum Book—"purportedly a letter to his children to memorialize their dead mother," scoffed reviewer Virginia Hyman—Sir Leslie, once again, managed to make it all about Sir Leslie. After pledging "simply to write about your mother," the memoirist amends: "In order to speak intelligibly it will be best to begin by saying something about myself." During his lifetime, Sir Leslie was obeyed—but not without resentment. After his death, Vanessa "dreamt on more than one occasion that she had murdered him," reports Frances Spalding (Vanessa Bell). Short of murdering him, Vanessa appears not to have expressed undue sorrow when she, Thoby, Adrian, and Virginia were freed of his rule and presence...

The Ekphrastic Body: Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works

In Woolf Works (2015), how does choreographer Wayne McGregor transpose literary modernism into dance? This essay explores how the concept of ekphrasis—the translation of a work of art from one aesthetic medium to another—illuminates McGregor’s ballet. The Virginia Woolf novels that McGregor represents in dance contemplate questions of character, beauty, and the sublime. As an analytical framework, ekphrasis helps to examine historical difference inherent in the reinterpretation of artworks. In McGregor’s ballet, that difference involves how Woolf’s aesthetic categories reappear today.

Translating the Unconscious: Aleramo's and Delmar's <em>A Woman</em>

Translating the Unconscious:Aleramo's and Delmar's A Woman Carol Mastrangelo Bové (bio) Sibilla Aleramo's novels, especially Una Donna, 1906 (A Woman), engage the reader in powerful modernist texts that anticipate some of Freud's discoveries in the same period, Virginia Woolf's novels by about ten years, and Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex by about forty (Ferme 1999). Una Donna, 1906 (A Woman), merits a re-examination of its relevance for a better understanding of psychoanalytic writing, feminism, and Translation Studies. My reading of this novel will focus on the unconscious desires and fears connected to sexuality and gender. I will refer to the Italian and English versions by the British feminist, Rosalind Delmar, originally published by Virago Limited in 1979, and, to a lesser extent, Maria Lansdale's translation by Putnam's Sons in 1908. Delmar's and Lansdale's translations of Aleramo enable one to better decipher the spirit of the original Italian by providing good but different interpretations to compare with one's own. This comparative, historical method is at the heart of recent developments in literary translation, which now emphasize a text as variable, changing with the mentality and resources of the translator and his or her formation. Internationally recognized scholars such as Emily Apter (Professor of French at NYU), Pascale Casanova (was Associated Researcher at the Center for Arts and Language and Literary Critic in Paris), and David Damrosch (Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University) have written cogently about the increasingly important and innovative role of translation in the study of literature and in the institutions that produce knowledge in the humanities. The emerging translation studies discipline is different from translation as it has been studied for instance, in the 1960s. At that time scholars often thought of a translated text as a literal and equal representation of the original and ignored for the most part the wide range of choices at the translator's disposal, choices that give different and often acceptable meanings to words that put into play a number of possibilities. Translation studies now understands more clearly that important texts in world literature rendered in another language [End Page 139] are different from the originals, manifesting the variety of cultural practices and the richness of linguistic, literary, and philosophical phenomena across linguistic and national borders. Literary translation is thus an interdiscipline drawing on the translator's formation and other historical, material conditions in which she or he lives. Based on the opposition "self/other," to the degree that one normally reproduces in one's own or target language an original or urtext from a foreign tongue, Translation Studies engages, for example, in psychology via psychoanalytic literary criticism—in fact, it has already done so in the work of Antoine Berman (1992) and others. Emily Apter, for instance, connects Translation Studies, in the context of psychoanalytic theory and group psychology, to foreign policy and efforts to promote world peace. She states that "mistranslation in the art of diplomacy thus comes to signal an intractable non-translatability between nations, a condition of catastrophic blocage that inspires paranoid projection and the moral calculus of the zero-sum game (in which whatever benefits one side is assumed to hurt the other). She gives a specific example of how mistranslation led to, if not the Franco-Prussian War, at least to a symptom of the "impossibility of dialogue constitutive of the truth of Franco-Prussian relations" (Apter 2006, 20-21). In this way, Berman's and Apter's work builds on the parallel established by Paul Ricoeur between the repression of fears and desires within the psyche, on the one hand, and censorship/banishment in groups or nations, on the other. Our contemporary period may be apparently more open to emotions considered taboo in the past, like the bisexual desire of Aleramo and her narrators. Yet increasing conflicts within individuals and between nations indicate, I would argue, as does Apter, a need to confront them. Scholars and non-academic readers in the United States and abroad often overlook Aleramo's seminal text in Italian and English, not to speak of the unconscious drives operating at the...

A Portrait of the Artist and Everyone Around Her

A Portrait of the Artist and Everyone Around Her Thais Rutledge (bio) Virginia Woolf: A Portrait Viviane Forrester Jody Gladding, trans. Columbia University Press www.cup.columbia.edu/book/virginia-woolf/9780231153577 256 Pages; Print, $36.00 First published in France 2009, Viviane Forrester's newly translated book presents a brief look at the life of Virginia Woolf, one of the most influential writers of the modernist movement. According to Forrester, Woolf was interested in life and yearned "to embrace the whole world with the arms of understanding." The book, which is replete with quotations from both Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf's personal diaries, intrigues and entices readers. Forrester uses a quote from Woolf's personal diary as evidence of the author's difficulty in pinpointing this thing we call 'life': '"Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on & say, 'This is it?'" Indeed, although life was the strange, inexplicable subject for Woolf, she had an artistic knack to depict life in her works. In addition, Woolf's novels, as Forrester indicates, introduce readers to the most unforgettable characters. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), for example, we meet Septimus Warren Smith, who can't feel sympathy with the world after the intense experience of war. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf presents readers with the stoic Mrs. Ramsay, a symbol of strength holding everyone together. While Forrester speaks of Woolf's unforgettable novels, she asks, "But can we say of her novels, which are so many live beings . . . . That's her?" Forrester's book, in an attempt to pinpoint Woolf, is marred by her endless opinions (which appear often as editorial notes) about those closest to the author and how they have an impact in her life. Forrester's book is divided into five parts. The first begins with an overview of Woolf's beautiful writing style and her ability to bring "the pages . . . to life." This section not only presents information about Woolf, it also examines how the author's life mirrored the lives of those closest to her, especially Leonard. According to Forrester, "[Woolf's life was] lived among other lives, silhouetted against [End Page 17] them." This is a terrific start, which entices the curious reader to discover links between Woolf's life and her fiction. Leonard become the focus of the section as Forrester's assumptions and doubts about the validity of Woolf's first biography "practically dictated by [Leonard] to Quentin Bell," Woolf's nephew pervade the pages. The first part spends much time discussing Leonard's life before, during, and after Woolf. Additionally, the section portrays Leonard as a weak, shy, and depressed individual who finds in the young, talented, unmarried Virginia Stephen, a way back to London's respectable society. Forrester's personal commentary about Leonard, and the tone she uses when speaking about him, highlights the negative influence he had upon Woolf's life. She says, "Leonard who uses Virginia to better hide himself and who officially attributes to her his own troubles, his own vertigo in facing the risk of his own alienation." Forrester's editorial commentary is relentless in this section, as she attacks Leonard and illustrates the emotional distance between the couple. Forrester's commentary on Leonard seem to distract her from the main task of examining Woolf's work in the first section. She, rather, spends much time insisting on the emotional distance between Leonard and Woolf. Leonard, in addition, is portrayed as a "discouraged, ruined man" by Forrester. As one reaches the end of the first part, one becomes confused and frustrated, as one can foresee that the author's many assumptions about Woolf's life will prevent and derail her from the main argument of the book—to find Woolf within her works. The second part focuses on Woolf's adolescent years and the deaths of Julia Stephen, Woolf's mother; Stella, a step-sister; and Leslie Stephen, Woolf's father. Woolf was thirteen years old when her mother died, and she described her mother's death as '"the greatest disaster that could happen.'" Forrester adds another quote from Woolf's diary in order to illuminate...

Literary Representations of Shell Shock as a Result of World War I in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway

World War I was a transformative catalyst towards the increased portrayal of psychological trauma in literary works. Neurological disorders became common within literary narratives after the war. Characters such as Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and the works of Ernest Hemingway are just some of the examples. This is significant because it provided returning soldiers with representation and voices to educate society of the problem. This article will focus on the representation of the neurological manifestations of trauma as a result of WWI. A voice was given to the millions of soldiers returning from the front experiencing shell shock and depression. Specifically, this article explores the portrayals of neurological trauma through the characters in Virginia Woolf's novels To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway and Ernest Hemingway's novels A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises.

Adjacency Pairs and Interactive Consciousness in Virginia Woolf's Novels

Adjacency Pairs and Interactive Consciousness in Virginia Woolf's Novels

Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning

Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning

Gender Ideology of Translators Implicated in Their Translations of Virginia Woolf's Novels

Abstract. Translation studies recently has focused on the role of translators in cultural communications and emphasized on the translator's identity as one of the factors which impacts the work of translation. This study has examined three novels of Virginia Woolf and their translations into Persian, one done by a female and the other by a male translator, to see the role of gender in choosing grammatical structures. Considering Farahzad's model of translation criticism which is inspired by CDA, as the framework, the corpus of this study has been examined and analyzed to see the relationship between gender ideology and translator's grammatical choices. In general, it can be said that male translators altered the style of the female author while female translators preserved the style and the theme of the texts. The number of negations and temporal shifts and also modal shifts in the males' translations were more than those in the females'. Further research can be conducted to examine the other ideological implications in other layers of the text.

From Modernity to Post-Modernity: Conflicting Voices in Literary Discourse – A Corpus Analysis of You and One

Abstract This paper discusses the possibilities of a corpus analysis applied to literary study and interpretation. It is thus its goal to present some findings related to the disambiguation of some pronominal references, i.e. you and one, as they occur in speech and thought presentation in prose fiction, across periods in the 20th century. The texts selected are two of Virginia Woolf's novels (early and late modernist period) and one by Hugo Hamilton (in the postmodern era). The analysis benefits from a multi-layered interpretive framework drawing on discourse analysis, corpus-based approaches and literary study, particularly in that it unpacks ways in which writers make use of linguistic structures. These involve readers in a dialogic interpretation of the text's “polyphony” and “heteroglossia”, either conveying the generic pronoun reference or the protagonist's inner voice.

Mormor — eller kampen om tiden

This article, with a title paraphrasing the title of Michael Ende's well known book Momo, is taking its starting point from the notion of elderly women as marginalized literary characters. However, instead of providing new examples of old facts it is argued that the "antie" (in Swedish: "Tanten") always have followed like a shadow in the footsteps of the Male Hero of, for instance, the crime novel. She has become an alternative representative witness and courier of the insoluble dilemma of time and human existence; she has regained potential to be considered to be the Everywoman of our life narratives. Drawing on famous examples, such as the middle aged Mrs Ramsay and Mrs Dalloway from Virginia Woolf's novels, but also the article writer's own grandmother, the article concludes that "Tanten" is a literary figure that must be understood in relation both to (possibly both engre and gender specific) aspects of style and discourse as well as to philosophical questions of time conception.

Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (review)

Reviewed by: Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin Benjamin Robinson Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin. Angeliki Spiropoulou. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. viii + 240. $80.00 (cloth). Quite apart from the striking biographical parallels between Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin, the affinities in their work are thoroughly compelling. Both sought to come to terms with what they perceived to be a change in the character of experience in the period in which they lived, a change which was intimately bound up with a sense of disjointed temporality and a dislocated perspective on history. This was expressed in a shared preoccupation with, among other things, the tenuous boundaries between history and fiction, the function and effect of generic distinctions, the relation between art and politics, and, indeed, with the sort of truth specific to works of art. Ultimately, they were concerned with the possibility of breaking with history insofar as it purveys and perpetuates structures of oppression, not by ignoring it (as if that were possible) but by transforming the mode of its conveyance into the present. Compelling though these correspondences may be, the differences in their style, disposition, language and tradition make the examination of the relation between Woolf and Benjamin a formidable task, which is no doubt part of the reason why Spiropoulou's is the first book-length study to undertake it. Spiropoulou, as the subtitle of her book suggests, proposes to present Woolf in "constellation" with Benjamin. Although this Benjaminian term has been much overused in the literature, the idea in this context is applicable. A constellation, in Benjamin, is the image produced by a certain configuration of discrete phenomena that does not sacrifice their specificity. As such, it provides a promising model with which to address the significance of the interrelation between Benjamin's and Woolf's work without leveling their differences. After two introductory chapters defining modernity and historiography in rather general terms, Spiropoulou's "constellation" consists of six chapters, each devoted to one of Woolf's novels, discussed with [End Page 181] reference to her relevant non-fictional writings, and set in relation to a figure or theme in Benjamin's work. The first of these addresses Jacob's Room in the context of her essay, "On Not Knowing Greek," in which Woolf suggests that the gesture of drawing on the tradition of antiquity has less to do with antiquity itself than with a gendered projection onto a foreign and obscure epoch of what "we" moderns lack. Spiropoulou reads Jacob's Room as rehearsing and so undermining such a masculine and masculinist appropriation of history. The next chapter focuses on Orlando and proposes, unconvincingly, to read the eponymous protagonist as Benjamin's "Angel of History" insofar as both are perceived as effecting a certain redemption of the past by working through past traumas. This reading, which reduces the complex and highly evocative image of the Angel of History to the assertion of contemporary cliché, is typical of Spiropoulou's reference to Benjamin in the book, which tends to be derivative, rarely actually engaging with his texts in any depth. This production of assertions out of Benjamin's eminently figurative prose is carried over to Spiropoulou's treatment of Woolf, whose literary writing she often reads as being assertive, despite this being at odds with the very theories of authority and artistic production she discusses. The subsequent chapter addresses the incongruous temporalities of history and nature in Woolf's fiction, especially in To the Lighthouse, with reference to Benjamin's obscure notion of natural history, which Adorno influentially took up and defined in dialectical form as taking what appears most historical to be natural and what appears most natural to be historical. The fourth, devoted to The Years, is developed around the common trope in both Woolf's and Benjamin's work of dreaming and awakening, which Spiropoulou relates to their shared interest in the ways that the everyday is mystified in the activities of daily life and obscured as an object of historical recollection. This theme is returned to in the final chapter, which looks at Woolf's late attempt to write a "real" historical work, intended...

Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values: Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway

One important kind of literary criticism involved in the turn describes and theorizes the ethical relations that readers perceive among characters or between characters and the narrator.1 My interest in such value structures within a literary text, however, begins from an issue still rarely treated. I am concerned with experimental narratives with third-person narrators who deliberately make it difficult for readers to discern what evaluative stance they are supposed to have toward characters, events, or descriptions.2 In Virginia Woolf s middle-period fiction, the narrator's tonal cues within the text are frequently contradictory, inconclusive, or simply absent. By tonal cues I mean textual markers that prompt readers to have one affective response rather than another a response like sympathy, condescension, irritation, suspicion, approval and to make conscious or unconscious evaluations accordingly: a character is good, pompous, or inferior; a passage of dialogue or indirect discourse is misleading, pretentious, or to the point. In the fiction that interests me here, third-person narrators give conflicting or insufficient guidance about whether a character is admirable or trustworthy or about whether a passage in the narrative voice or an utterance by a character should be regarded seriously or ironically. In Peter Rabinowitz's terms, readers lack the wherewithal to make snap moral judgments, a loss that makes moral judgment puzzling and thus important to the process of reading (Rabinowitz 84-93). Mrs. Dalloway, one of the most beloved of Woolf 's novels, is also one of the most experimental in terms of the values its third-person narrator complicates or withholds. Its affective indeterminacy leaves elements of the story open to different responses, and these responses cue conscious or unconscious judgments.3 For

Masochistic Modernisms:A Reading of Eliot and Woolf

Masochistic Modernisms:A Reading of Eliot and Woolf Eve Sorum (bio) In Virginia Woolf's penultimate diary entry, made as German planes flew over London and as she began her final descent into illness, she proclaims, "No: I intend no introspection. [. . .] Observe perpetually. [. . .] Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope" (Diary V 357–58). In these words we see kernels of a modernist aesthetic—a sense of both resiliency and despair in the face of terrifying mental, social, and political events, and the determination to make some use of this situation through a creative act. By taking Gilles Deleuze's explanation of the formal nature of masochism one step further, I argue that this modernist aesthetic depends on a dynamics of suffering and compensation that can be described as masochism.1 I would like to forge a stronger connection between these two systems of ordering the world—literary aesthetics and masochism—by suggesting that attention to this surface link will reveal the ways in which a masochistic ordering through pain actually defines key modernist aesthetic philosophies. Looking through the lens of masochism, therefore, I propose a rereading of the work and aesthetic philosophies of two major modernists, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. I have chosen these two writers because they are viewed as canonical representatives of high modernism, and they both wrote a number of pieces that proclaim their aesthetic visions. Focusing on Eliot and Woolf also means that that I can probe the manifestation of a masochistic aesthetics in poetry and in fiction, as well as in their stylistically and tonally contrasting essays. Even when these writers examine a similar dynamic—for example, the relationship between reader and text, as we will see in Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and Woolf's "On Being Ill"—they formulate the interaction in tellingly different ways. Thus, pairing them allows for an exploration of the variations within a masochistic aesthetics. [End Page 25] My project involves a shift in critical focus: instead of thinking primarily about how modernist literature orders a chaotic world, I examine how Eliot and Woolf's aesthetic philosophies depend on this chaos. In other words, the suffering, pain, self-sacrifice, and disorientation are precisely what enable acts of literary creation, and the artist comes into being through exposure to such shattering experiences. Reading Eliot and Woolf through masochism, therefore, gives us a new way to conceive of a modernism that feeds off of suffering for its sense of meaning. The aesthetics of Eliot and Woolf are what I will call a masochistic aesthetics—a manifestation of a particularly modernist conception of the artist and her project, in which creativity and self-destruction are linked in inextricable and productive ways. Identifying the latent masochism in their works does not diminish our view of Eliot's and Woolf's novels and poems as brilliant aesthetic achievements; it does, however, redirect our attention to the simultaneous dependence on and rejection of the fissures, sacrifices, and gaps that produce these pieces of literature. The darker side of this inquiry, of course, revolves around the perhaps unanswerable question of whether suffering, however successfully it produces meaning and order, can ever be worthwhile. In the past decades, numerous critics of Eliot and Woolf have touched on the relationship between suffering, alienation, or loss and the writers' literary production. Maud Ellmann provides a thorough reading of Eliot's theory of impersonality as she explores how his poems "compose and decompose the self" (15). Roger Poole rereads Woolf's mental breakdowns through her novels in an attempt to understand the biographical through the literary, while Shirley Panken takes the opposite approach by examining the ways in which Woolf works through her emotional and psychological problems in her writing. Work done on trauma, mourning, and the Great War has opened up new ways of reading the writing of these modernists. Tammy Clewell argues that, in "her sustained effort to confront the legacy of the war, Woolf repeatedly sought not to heal wartime wounds, but to keep them open" (198), thereby initiating a discussion of the way that absence and loss figure as essential elements in Woolf's...

From Supernova to Manuscript Page: Circling Woolf

Woolf criticism has reached an enviable position. No one who has read Woolf's novels at all carefully still assents to Leonard Woolf's description of her as "the least political animal that has lived since Aristotle invented the definition" (27); Modern Fiction Studies has chosen to mark its fiftieth anniversary with this special issue; virtually every course on modern British literature now includes her, even [End Page 224] when she is the only woman taught. Woolf is securely canonical. Woolf critics are therefore free to pursue lines of inquiry that would have been difficult had the project of recovery not been so thoroughly carried through. They can, as they do in the texts under review here, delve into a range of important contexts within which Woolf lived and wrote. Situating Woolf within diverse terrains, these studies contribute what we might call "thick contextualization" to Woolf studies.

Form as Compensation for Life: Fictive Patterns in Virginia Woolf's Novels by Oddvar Holmesland (review)

Form as Compensation for Life: Fictive Patterns in Virginia Woolf's Novels by Oddvar Holmesland (review)

Moving Tropes: New Modernist Travels with Virginia Woolf

The article concentrates on one of Virginia Woolf's profoundly lyrial novels, Mrs. Dallowav, to question the dominant acceptance of Woolf's British rootedness and lack of wanderlust. Through close reading and analysis of pertinent passages, the article shows how Woolf was not simply experimenting with forms, but also pushing forward in her tropes movement across borders and travel. Every character in the novel is somehow related to place. The domestic dimension of this novel, stressed for so long, is problematized to give way to fresh view of Woolf as more transnational than appears. The article calls on recent works in anthropological and feminist criticism related to boundary crossing to throw light on Woolf's text. The study draws parallels between movement of characters in London and the rhetoric of travel indicated or subsumed in the lyricism of the text. Even in shop windows gazed at by the protagonist in the novel, global relations of power are inscribed, destabilizing the stasis of home and creating metaphoric hybridity. ********** London is enchanting. I step out upon tawny coloured magic carpet ... Faces passing lift up my mind; prevent it from settling ... --Virginia Woolf All must end upon the Odyssey ... --Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf's profoundly lyrical fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, set in London and focused on day in the life of one woman and her preparations for society soiree, is most often interpreted as thoroughly British, purely 'domestic,' novel. In fact, before feminist recuperations of her oeuvre made waves beginning in the early 1970s, Woolf's novels were valued by many scholars of the modernist period more for their aesthetic experimentation than the way in which they address important social and political issues. In the few sentences John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury devote to Woolf in their survey of canonical Modernism, her novels are described as exploration[s] both of the aesthetic of consciousness and the aesthetics of art characterized by a kind of joyous artistic freedom to focus on form (408-09). Beyond an interest in formalist issues, comparisons between Woolf and her Modernist contemporaries--T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Ezra Pound and others--have never been extensively drawn. One significant reason for this oversight is the fact that Woolf, living and writing in Bloomsbury, never embraced the wandering, expatriate, starving artist existence that other Modernists did. Geographical wanderings, critics insist, produced an added dimension to the works of the High Modernist canon noticeably absent from Woolf's life and work. (1) And yet, Woolf's novel is teeming with hidden--or at least largely critically unrecognized--lyrical metaphors of movement and multiple tropes of travel at work within its English domestic setting that frustrate and problematize purely aesthetic readings of the novel. (2) Indeed, every character in the novel is implicitly or explicitly linked to foreign places, peoples or travel. And yet what does it mean that, punning, Woolf names one of Septimus's nerve doctors Dr. Holmes? Or that Dr. Bradshaw wants to commit Septimus to home? Mrs. Dalloway seems to propose dialectical relationship between incessant movement and domestic stasis that performs radical re-interpretation of twentieth century ideas of the English home and empire. Of particular importance is re-examination of the character, Peter Walsh, not as Clarissa's patriarchal nemesis, but as an Anglo-Indian struggling to fashion some sort of coherent identity out of his colonial past, and character of central importance to Woolf. Further, how might Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus operate as doubles in geopolitical sense? And what should one make of the Irish characters, Moll Pratt and Mrs. Walker, who appear briefly in Clarissa's movements as she prepares for her party? All the characters' private contemplations and mental musings take place while they are in motion, perambulating across Regent's Park, traveling down Bond Street or riding atop an omnibus across London. …

Form as Compensation for Life: Fictive Patterns in Virginia Woolf's Novels

Reading a novel by Virginia Woolf involves an element of 'double reflexiveness': first, the reader's interaction with Woolf's words and what they describe, and second, the interaction of these words with the world Woolf perceived and attempted to represent. Oddvar Holmesland takes this paradox and shows that it is not the invention of recent critics but something of which Woolf herself is well aware. In a number of analyses of Woolf's major works - Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves - he explores the ambiguity that Woolf's reader must work through in order to reach the insights and rewards that her fiction offers. Professor ODDVAR HOLMESLAND is Professor of English at the University of Tromso, Norway.

"Whose Books Once Influenced Mine": The Relationship between E. M. Forster's Howards End and Virginia Woolf's The Waves

In letter to Ethel Smyth on 21 Sept. 1930, Virginia spoke of her friend Morgan Forster as E. M. Forster the novelist, whose books once influenced mine, and are very good, think, though impeded, shrivelled and immature (Letters 4: 218). In earlier letters had often alluded to Forster's influence, even insisting on one occasion that I always feel that nobody, except perhaps Morgan Forster, lays hold of the thing have done (14 June 1925; Letters 3: 188). By 1930 this literary friendship had continued for more than two decades and was characterized by the kind of edginess that often marks the relationships of highly competitive artists. During the same year, Forster recorded his own anxieties about in note that we find in his Commonplace Book: Visit to Virginia, prospects of, not wholly pleasurable. shall watch her curiosity and flattery exhaust themselves in turn. Nor does it do to rally the Pythoness (54). These comments, written when both writers were well launched as established novelists and public figures, give some indication of the complex literary friendship that goaded and nourished both writers. In this essay we shall explore how that relationship manifests itself in two of their best-known novels, Howards End and Waves, through significant parallels in their thematics, narrative voice, and imagery. Although Forster was himself just three years older than he represents an earlier generation, in part because of his extraordinary precocity and also in part because - not enjoying some of the educational advantages afforded Forster - began her career more slowly, publishing her first novel when she was 33 years old. In contrast, Howards End, one of Forster's two most celebrated novels, was published when its author was barely 31, having been preceded by three other novels and followed year later by collection of tales. When Woolf's first novel appeared in 1915, Forster had been publishing fiction for ten years, and considered him senior peer among British writers. and Forster related to one another as practicing novelists, as critics who reviewed each other's work, and as friends within their Bloomsbury connections. In 1910 Forster gave his first talk to the Friday Club on The Feminine Note in Literature, and before that he had known Leonard at Cambridge through their membership in the Apostles (Furbank 1: 192). Forster began his practice of reviewing Woolf's novels with Voyage Out. Indeed P. N. Furbank, Forster's biographer, claims that after Forster's favourable review of Voyage Out in 1915 [Woolf] 'became very dependent on his opinion' (qtd. in Dowling 85). It is instructive to compare this relationship to the much more vexed one of and Katherine Mansfield. Viewed within that context, the ties between Forster and seem extraordinarily positive and long-lasting. Forster appears to have been most comfortable with Woolf's earlier works, such as Voyage Out, book similar to his own: in The Early Novels of Virginia Woolf (1925) he describes it as a strange, tragic, inspired book [whose] closing chapters are as poignant as anything in modern fiction . (Abinger Harvest 107). (It seems to us that in A Passage to India Forster repeats many of the structural and thematic motifs he found in Voyage Out.) But when began, with Jacob's Room (1922), to assume her more distinctive voice, Forster's praise became more ambivalent. Even following the comparative success of Jacob's Room, however, continued to see Forster as her senior in accomplishment until the mid-20s, when her next novel, Mrs. Dalloway, established her as the equal of her friend. But we should not underestimate the element of competition. Both writers were trying to establish the narrative aesthetics of their time, and each resisted definitions developed by the other. In Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), places Forster among the Georgian, or new novelists who are moving away from old-fashioned realism (Captain's Death Bed 95); year later, in The Early Novels of Virginia Woolf, Forster praises Jacob's Room and Mrs. …

Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, and Influence

This study examines how Eudora Welty was influenced by Virginia Woolf's novels and the ways in which Welty assimilated in her work the concerns she inherited from Woolf. It locates Welty's fiction in the tradition of modernism and emphasizes her interest in expanding the novel as a genre.