Woolf's Fiction Research Articles

'Haunted by ambiguities' revisited: in search of a metamethod for literary text disambiguation

Abstract This paper addresses the issue of ambiguity in literary discourse, viewed through its multiple verbal and narrative manifestations in Virginia Woolf's short fiction. The research is aimed to combine traditional and most recent techniques of semantic, conceptual, narrative, semiotic, and configurational analyses as constituents of a metamethod of literary text disambiguation, which highlights some hidden features of the writer's linguistic personality.

Maritime Modernism: The Aqueous Form of Virginia Woolf's The Waves

Despite the rise of eco-critical approaches to Woolf's writing and a thriving debate as to whether her 1931 novel perpetuates or challenges colonialist axiomatics, The Waves has not inspired an extended, focused investigation of its articulation of aqueous nature and the latter's reshaping under imperial maritime power. This essay examines how a critique of maritime modernity emerges from The Waves' modernist orchestration of the seas. I contend that the work sets a conventional representation of the waters as facilitators of national and imperial progress against a counter-articulation that formally challenges it. The novel thus allows us to place it in the context of inscriptions of the seas by techno-sciences and international law during high imperialism and re-organizations of the seas as the empire contracts. Viewed in relation to the maritime recoding of the planet's hydrosphere, and the perceptual modes, narratives, and ethos of mastery it engenders, The Waves elucidates an alternative vision to a life-world made uneven by this recoding. Concentrating on waters, I conclude, allows us to glean a textured view of an understudied but persistent feature in Woolf's fiction.

“The doors would be taken off their hinges”: Space, Place and Architectural Absence in Virginia Woolf

ABSTRACTThis article considers the affective possibilities of negative architectural space—that is, thresholds, portals and vast interior voids—in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), novels in which windows and doors routinely fail to serve their intended and most obvious functions. In these texts, the prominence given to thresholds not only serves to create the illusion of a spatiality, but, more broadly, the dissolution of architectural space underscores Woolf's multivalent attack on a patriarchal machine, and serves to suggest the permeability of domestic boundaries as a necessary component of a modern experience of “place”. In Woolf's fiction, thresholds become black holes of belatedness couched within white walls of newness, intensification and modernity, registering the friction between the past and an immediate understanding of being in a particular place at this precise moment of being.

Virginia Woolf's The Waves and the Everyday

In the early days of Woolf criticism, the well-known Woolf scholar Stuart Clarke suggests, it was simple. If a potential reader of Woolf's fiction were to ask where he or she should start, “the ans...

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

Virginia Woolf and the migrations of language

Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language. Emily Dalgarno (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012) ix + 215pp. For Virginia Woolf, the means and ends of changed significantly throughout her career. What began as a pragmatic and, as she would claim, amateur reading practice--employed by a reader simply wishing to access the work of Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, and others--evolved into a critical practice that transformed her work with the English language. In Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language, Emily Dalgarno argues that Woolf came to understand as opportunity to challenge and revise the dominant such that it might better accommodate diverse voices and perspectives. This revision, as Dalgarno explains, accords with Woolf's career-long desire to rethink the English at the level of the sentence order better to meet the requirements of women writers (1). Dalgarno reads scenes of in Woolf's fiction alongside her private reading notebooks in order to uncover how the writer's practices informed her composition. Pointing to Woolf's sustained fascination with French, and Russian, Dalgarno acknowledges but ultimately disputes Woolf's claims to amateurism. These self-critical attitudes, Dalgarno explains, emerged in tandem with Woolf's sense of herself as both an outsider and a critic of institutionalized learning (2). Such a strategically adopted outsider's lens would prove valuable to theorizing the role of the translator as a mediator between cultures and nations. Woolf was clearly someone for whom foreign languages redrew the map of the world (2)--almost literally, it seems, as would in fact become central to Woolf's understanding of national identity in the 1930s. In exploring how allowed Woolf to participate in debates about nation and nationalism, Dalgarno contributes to scholarship on Woolf and colonial discourse by Laura Doyle, Mark Wollaeger, Urmila Seshagiri, and Jed Esty. From the outset of her argument, Dalgarno considers Woolf's writings alongside theories of translation, lucidly introducing the writings of Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Lawrence Venuti. When read alongside Woolf's fiction and nonfiction, according to Dalgarno, these theories reveal the scope of her attempts to redesign the sentence and to recreate the dominant language (1). By forging new connections between Woolf studies and studies, Dalgarno's project contributes richly to both. Absent from this exchange, however, is scholarship on and modernism, perhaps because many such studies have focused on classical literature, with cast as a temporal leap between ancients and moderns. Dalgarno usefully varies this pattern by considering Woolf's negotiations with Sophocles as well as contemporaries Proust and Tolstoy. Beginning with the essay On Not Knowing Greek, Dalgarno contextualizes Woolf's words by tracing a longstanding cultural debate about the social role of translation. Familiar with mandates for legible translations that presume the reader's reliance on the translator's expertise, Woolf was also drawn to translations that magnify foreignness in order to approximate the experience of reading in a different language. According to Dalgarno, Woolf ultimately shaped for herself a position more like that of explorer than a university professor. Even as she advocates for the common reader, she also domesticates translation by way of intertextual references to the British literary canon (23). Woolf not only read and composed translations, but also published them. The Hogarth Press translations of Russian literature, as Dalgarno explains, appealed to the already growing British readership for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. At the same time, these translations helped transform what had been a small, insular press into operation with a discernible stake in international modernism (6). …

The Writer's Diary as Borderland: The Public and Private Selves of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott

‘It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes and work at certain effects. I daresay I practised Jacob here; and Mrs D and shall invent my next book here …’ So wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary in 1924. In this essay I extend Woolf's idea of a writer's journal as a practice ground to that of a borderland mediating the public and private identities of the three women whose diaries I examine here: Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott. In the major fictions of all three writers, moreover, we encounter multiple images of both mirrors and windows, open and closed. Emily Dalgarno has argued that for Woolf, this motif is linked to a childhood trauma that Woolf recounted in ‘A Sketch of the Past’. In ‘Sketch’, Woolf writes of the ‘small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House’ and the ‘looking glass-shame’ she continued to feel as an adult, and connects this shame to being molested as a ‘very small’ child by her much older stepbrother in front of that hallway mirror. Dalgarno posits that this event constitutes the primal source for mirror tropes in Woolf's fiction. In this essay, I suggest that by exploring the diaries that all three writers kept throughout their lives, we may likewise find a context for understanding their repetitive use of these key images of self-perception, subjectivity and familial identity. The diaries of Woolf, Mansfield and Alcott, I argue, functioned both as the mirrors that reflected, and the windows that framed, or offered escape from, the split-voiced selves of the writers that composed them, and thus offer readers a unique glimpse of creativity in action.

From Virginia's Sister to Friday's Silence

The article aims to produce new thinking about the representation of disability in contemporary literature, especially understood with reference to uses of metaphor and the question of a material disabled presence. It also wishes to make a claim for what is termed the persistence of disability in contemporary writing, an idea that connects writing over the last 25 years back to the modes of disability representation established early in the twentieth century. As such, it starts with a set of thoughts about Virginia Woolf's half-sister Laura Stephen, disabled and ultimately institutionalized, and the ways in which a reading of the presence of Laura in Woolf's fiction suggests a method that allows for a more sophisticated analysis of the instances of disability in contemporary writing. The article then discusses marginality, metaphor, and materiality in a range of contemporary texts, suggesting that, although frequent and highly problematic representations of characters with disabilities continue, there a...

Mrs. Dalloway’s Animals and the Humanist Laboratory

Mrs. Dalloway's sustained critique of structures of hierarchy and dominance that underpin patriarchy, imperialism, and class extends species difference and obsession with mastery that determines boundary between human and nonhuman. The novel explores various social institutions and spaces that actively, even violently, produce idealized concept of human, a concept that sciences of Woolf's time were steadily, if ambivalently, eroding.' This distinction between human and nonhuman orders of being has been called the most devastating imaginary of our epoch (Esposito 1.61), and growing interest in this threshold across a range of disciplines from literary studies and philosophy social and biological sciences has focused attention on complex ethical issues regarding medical research, zoological captivity, consumption and production of food, and environmental sustainibility. As Margot Norris explains, In process of reorienting human subject within its metaphysical and ethical cosmos, these theoretical resources have begun recuperate human qua animal from ideological repression, marginalization, and demonization (9). This recuperation not only appreciates human animal as a. being distinct from cultural entity, but also challenges very idea that domains of social and cultural are exclusively human. When Clarissa Dalloway ruminates on her love of life throughout a June day in. 1923, she pauses savor her secret deposit of exquisite moments and acknowledge debt she owes those who have given her life its particular luster: one must repay in daily life servants, yes, dogs and canaries, above all Richard her husband, who was foundation of (28-29). For all Clarissa's biocentric exuberance, what informs her generous gratitude toward those other sentient beings, whether human or nonhuman, who support her way of life is an unshakeable belief that it is singularly blessed and purified (28). Woolf's oft-cited intention to criticise social system (Diary 248) in Mrs. Dalloway extends a confounding of categories of species, as in above quotation, where servants are separated from dogs and canaries only by a frivolous affirmation.The social hostess clears her conscience over a debt of gratitude, repayment of which she endlessly defers, animal that produces her exalted way of life, regardless of class, ethnicity, or even species of that The figure of human surfaces. in Mrs. Dalloway in. a number of animal guises: birds that chirp in Greek war veteran Septimus; hatred Clarissa experiences as a hoofed brute within herself; and resemblance of German outcast Doris Kilman a prehistoric monster (123), for example. Through these and other unreconstructed images of man as animal of polis, Woolf unearths very fantasy by which humanity constructs its exalted status through violent repression of animal and animalistic. As a deliberate counter this, offices of Harley Street nerve specialist Sir William Bradshaw provide an experimental laboratory in which idea of human is artificially produced through doctor's division of populace into different zones of life whose breeding can be regulated and unsocial impulses (99) contained. Ultimately what is at stake, as in much of Woolf's fiction, is changing shape of human character as its unexpected relations come light. Set in London following Britain's victory in first global war, novel depicts humanistic paradigm at center of empire that drives its self-image. At same time, Woolf suggests culture's demise through very social strategies and sciences--medical, eugenical, and evolutionary--that work define its place at top of a great chain of being, itself understood as a geo-political as well as metaphysical hierarchy. …

Misperceiving Virginia Woolf

The longstanding critical refrain that Virginia Woolf's fiction represents a turn "inward" to the vagaries of the inner life has more recently been countered with an "outward" approach emphasizing Woolf's interest in the material world, its everyday objects and their social and political significance. Yet one of the most curious and pervasive features of Woolf's oeuvre is that characters are so frequently wrong in their perceptions. This essay consolidates the inward and outward approaches by tracing the trope of misperception in Woolf's fiction as well as in her conceptions of the work of author and reader. For Woolf, the modern literary experience derives from the nature of the faculties of perception, the tenuous points of connection—and disjunction—between the inner and the outer worlds.

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...

The Empire and Its Other Servants

The Empire and Its Other Servants Eve M. Troutt Powell (bio) For many years, I felt locked out of the intimate spaces in Virginia Woolf's fiction. I read A Room of One's Own as an undergraduate, but my experience of the book was overshadowed by a workshop I attended soon after that reading, in which Toni Morrison elegantly, eloquently, and angrily criticized the unconscious privilege she read in Woolf's need of an isolated and private room for writing. Black women writers, I remember Morrison saying, had never, historically, enjoyed that kind of spatial privilege. They would have worked in these rooms, yes, but only to clean them. That statement repelled me from Virginia Woolf for decades. Yet Alison Light's searching and beautifully written Mrs Woolf and the Servants has brought me back to the writer. Light's book insistently keeps Virginia Woolf in full view of her female servants, rewriting the author's biography to keep her life in close connection to those who worked for her parents, her sister, her husband, and for her. As Light describes these connections, she also writes the story of British service. This encompasses even more than labor history: "it's hard to resist the conclusion that the history of service is the history of British women" (xv). What has kept the histories of these women in service out of the light is a blinding combination of British class prejudice, misogynistic revulsion from working women's physicality, Victorian prurience, and, finally, documentation. What records did the servants ever leave? The real source of privilege, as Virginia Woolf certainly knew, was having the proper documents and therefore being fully present in all aspects of British political society. In the larger domain of the British empire, the correct legal identification papers, diplomas, and licenses embodied the difference between social inferiority and true political and economic autonomy. Even upper-class women struggled against their own legal and economic dependence; Light shows the frustration with which Virginia Woolf mourned her own lack of education (266). For women in service, many of them from the rural poor or urban orphans sent from workhouses, such documentation seems unimaginable. Their work was done without contract and with very little education. The limits of Virginia Woolf's otherwise powerful imagination left her maids-of-all-work, cooks, and cleaners as silent as the mute subalterns lamented by theorist Gayatri Spivak and other scholars of colonialism. Even their labor barely registered as work for the upper classes considering their "servant question." As Light writes, "servants were an [End Page 144] expense and an intrusion, they might weigh a little on the conscience, but it was not a matter of their 'exploitation'. Few saw domestic work as 'labour'; masters and mistresses thought of giving their live-in maids their 'keep' rather than their 'pay'" (61). The challenge for a book that, like Mrs Woolf and the Servants, clearly intends to set these women's records straight is to make sure the lived lives of the servants were as interesting as lives more diligently documented and publicly lived, like the Woolfs. Are they worth studying for their pathos, as seems to be the case with Sophie Farrell, one of the first of Virginia and her siblings' many housemaids and nannies? Sophie came from a poor rural family long used to sending children into service; she worked for Virginia's parents, the Stephens, for years. After their deaths, she worked for the children in their own house and then stayed with Virginia well into the latter's adulthood. For many years she slept in the basements of these different households, in dank, filthy, and dark spaces (32). Are the servants worthy of scrutiny for their struggle for a voice within such unequal households or for their challenges to their employer's authority, as was the case with Nellie Boxall, who worked for Virginia and her husband, Leonard, for eighteen years before being unceremoniously let go? With her often-illuminated writing and wonderful use of photographs, Alison Light explains the many riches found in documenting and textualizing the lives of these servant women. First, by exploring the period from the 1870s through the...

Women Knitting: Domestic Activity, Writing, and Distance in Virginia Woolf's Fiction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsSayaka OkumuraSayaka Okumura completed her PhD in English and Related Literature at the University of York.

"Dispersed Are We": Mirroring and National Identity in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

The fluctuations of mind, and ever failing effort of individual subjectivity to create a solid sense of self, form a central theme in Virginia Woolf's work. Most of her novels examine this dynamics within consciousness of one subjectivity, or within several separate ones. Woolf's artistic concentration on sphere led to accusations of political quietism made against her already during her lifetime.1 In last decade or two, however, an increasing recognition has emerged among Woolf's critics that social and political dimensions of her fiction are no less farreaching and innovative than her investigation of private subjectivity. Leonard Woolf's famous assertion that his wife was the least political animal that has lived since Aristotle invented definition2 is still often cited, but usually in order to be rebuffed as an absurdity. It has become widely established by now that Woolf's fiction is deeply political, not merely in its preoccupation with feminism (where Woolf is anti-patriarchal in both domestic and social sphere) but also in its anti-fascist concern (where she is anti-patriarchal on national level as well). This critical awareness has led, in recent years, to a growing interest in Between Acts (1941), usually taken to be Woolf's most political fictional work. Its protagonist, if such a term is at all applicable to this novel,

Contradiction and ambivalence : Virginia Woolf and the aesthetic experience in "The Duchess and the Jeweller"

In the midst of the terror waged on Europe by Nazi demonstrations of power and racial extermination Virginia Woolf published a most contrevorsial short story -"The Duchess and the Jeweller" (1938)- which was originally entitled "The Duchess and the Jew" but was changed at the request of Woolf's American publisher for its racist connotations. The story has been neglected by the critics on account of two major reasons: on the one hand, it does not partake of those innovative narrative devices that most of Woolf's fiction presents; on the other such an apparently Anti-Semitist piece of work is inconveniently at odds with the oeuvre of a writer who so ardently and energetically rejected Fascism in her pamphlet Three Guineas which was curiously simultaneous in date of composition and publication to "The Duchess and the Jeweller". Despite the fact that Woolf may have been airing her personal prejudices of race and class in the characters of Oliver Bacon and the Duchess of Lambourne, the present paper does not aim to do away with such incoherence, ambivalence and contradiction, but rather focuses on the jewel imagery which structures the narrative and which addresses questions such as the 'art for art's sake' doctrine versus the material commodity of beauty

"Some Little Language Such as Lovers Use": Virginia Woolf's Elemental Erotics of Simile 1

For Hana I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement (The Waves) "Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? (The Waves) He had no command of metaphor (Between the Acts) Is it possible to speak origin, to linguistically articulate primordial sexuality? The unconscious, Lacan says, "is neither primordial nor instinctual" and knows nothing about "the elemental" other than "the elements of the signifier" (1970, 170). These elements are semantically empty, not referring "to any object" yet "structured like a language" (Lacan 1997, 167). Could there be a linguistic form wherein the unconscious accesses the elemental the unconscious can never fully grasp? Lacan, in his suspicion of origin, would seem not to encourage such a search. Yet the writing of Virginia Woolf, considered in terms of its narrative and rhetorical patterns as structures and hence modes of organization of the unconscious suggests a linguistically specific way of speaking the primordial as a zone of the real within the symbolic. 2 This article rhetorically maps Woolf's writing of the elemental, in particular in her last novel Between the Acts. I trace Woolf's writing of the elemental in terms of Michèle Montrelay's theorizing of an elemental signifier, part of the shadowy, ancestral zones of the real, and in terms of the tradition of elocution, of the theorizations of the figures and tropes of [End Page 567] style. These theorizations of forms of language more numerous by far than the forms invoked by Lacan, Montrelay, and other psychoanalysts alert to the linguistic substrate of the unconscious, provide precise grids for mapping the linguistic structures of the psyche. 3 Rhetorical theory, a taxonomy of the symbolic, has always included forms rhetoricians associated with the elemental or archaic. This theory can help us do more than detect and even explicate the thinking of the elemental in Woolf's fiction. It can help us map the specific linguistic structure of an elemental signifier. Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts, ends on the verge of an ecstatic "tearing asunder" (156). As the reality of an English village at the time of World War II devolves into the "prehistoric" (158), the novel's two main characters, Isa and Giles, are at the threshold of a moment of intimacy as alluring as it is frightening: Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared, also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night . . . It was the night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high places among rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke. (158-159) The rest is silence. Or seems to be. The language spoken by the pre-historicized Giles and Isa seems to remain beyond the novel and the personal history of Virginia Woolf, who took her life before the novel went to press. Is the language of the psychic pre-historic what can never be re-articulated within the symbolic? Is it, although "spoke[n]," part of the unrepresentable, what Lacan would theorize as the real? Woolf described the writer's helplessness in the face of the cataclysmic real of death, saying she would never be able to represent "the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye and brain" (1980, 327). Does Between the Acts suggest that [End Page 568] when fiction and language meet impending apocalypse, when the imaginary and the symbolic are at the point of colliding with the real of death, what is...

"Telling Brutal Things": Colonialism, Bloomsbury and the Crisis of Narration in Leonard Woolf's "A Tale Told by Moonlight"

Upon returning from Ceylon in 1911, where he had served for nearly eight years as a colonial bureaucrat, Leonard Woolf resigned his post in the colonial service and married Virginia Stephen, eventually settling down with her in their home, Monk's House in Sussex in 1916. Along with Virginia and Vanessa and their Cambridge friends, Leonard Woolf established the new Bloomsbury Group as the center of a liberal aesthetic and intellectual culture fashioned after the tradition inherited from the late Victorians. During this pe riod Leonard Woolf wrote his novel The Wise Virgins (1914), and a novel and three short stories based on his experienced in Ceylon, The Village in the Jungle (1913) and Stories of the East (1921). Woolf's five-part autobiography was to appear much later in the 1960s. Despite the growing body of scholarship on Bloomsbury, Leonard Woolf's fiction has been of peripheral interest to literary scholars. The Wise Virgins remains his most widely discussed literary work, mainly because of its portrayal of the troubled relationship between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell.1 Praised by Quentin Bell as a novel of su perbly dispassionate observation, but also reviled as a work with too many blacks in it2—this was the reason Lytton Strachey offered for not liking it— The Village in the Jungle was largely ignored by scholars. It was only during the 1960s, nearly fifty years after its first appearance in 1913, that scholars from South Asia recognized the novel as a significant social document about colo nial Ceylon. As for Stories of the East, it failed to generate any interest during Woolf's lifetime, and Woolf's contemporary Bloomsbury friends and peers, who had on other occasions been eager to express their personal views on his work, remained silent about this work. Modern critics seem largely to be un aware of its existence, and despite its republication in 1963 in Diaries in Ceylon

The Cambridge companion to Virginia Woolf

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010) xxi + 272pp The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers. Ed. Maren Tova Linett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010) xxiii + 224pp Published in 2000, first edition of The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf declared that its attentions would be directed Woolf's mind: breadth of her intellectual range; her impulsive flights of creative brilliance, long labours of composition; her conversations with present; her arguments with history (xiii). This second edition, directed towards those wishing to augment their reading through an introduction to interrogations and discoveries of Woolf scholars today (xix) has lost none of its enthusiasm for its subject, and its scope remains impressive. The first five chapters of revised edition focus on establishing intellectualism and radicalism of Woolf. Andrew McNeillie's opening essay is still a lively read, concentrating on geographical and intellectual connections of group and tracing early cultural influences on Woolf, while acknowledging that [w]e need to recognise Woolf's resistance, her difference, and admit her own trajectory, beyond Bloomsbury (14). The following three chapters turn their attention to Woolf's fiction by period. Susan Dick's examination of Woolf's use of literary realism is gone, and instead volume appears to concentrate on more obviously modernist innovations of Woolf's fiction. Suzanne Raitt's exploration of voice(s) in Woolf's early novels is effective in its aim to move beyond reading of these as what she terms apprentice work; Jane Goldman, meanwhile, explores lyric experimentalism of Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, interrogating distinctions between poetry and prose in Woolf's writing. Julia Briggs's analysis of Woolf's later fictions of 1930s, however, opens up possibility of moving beyond modernist tropes. She discusses gender, class and historical moments (70), but one of most intriguing aspects is her description of way in which Between Acts adapts a way of writing with amused affection about domestic or village life that was popular during 1930s (77). She goes on to invite comparisons to writers such as E. M. Delafield, Jan Struther and E. F. Benson--writers typically associated with middlebrow culture. Woolf's own views on middlebrow are of course well known, but recent developments in study of middlebrow have attempted to rescue term from its pejorative associations. Critics such as Nicola Humble, Faye Hammill and Ann Ardis have led way for reevaluation of relationship between modernism and middlebrow modes of fiction. Of course, paradigms concerning high and low cultures have also shifted considerably since first edition, and more highbrow elements of Woolf's fiction and her interest in common reader are discussed here. Lee's chapter on Woolf's essays, for example, notes their accessibility and popularity as opposed to their credibility (citing reception of Eliot's criticism as a point of comparison). Given impact of rethinkings of brow boundaries in criticism today, however, it does seem a pity that a more explicit and prolonged discussion of cultural hierarchy in relation to Woolf is absent. The study does, however, touch on sometimes difficult and tentative relationship between Woolf and modernism. The chapter that best reflects this is Michael Whitworth's excellent analysis of Woolf, modernism and modernity. (It should be noted here that this is only essay from previous edition to have undergone notable revisions; majority of other chapters, with exception of Raitt's, have been largely untouched.) The addition of term to title of chapter is significant. Ardis has argued that literary modernism has been privileged as the aesthetic of (115), and indeed criticism has tended to treat modernism and modernity as practically synonymous. …

Carnivalesque Comedy in Between the Acts

Writing of her composition of Between the Acts, Woolf noted simply in her diary, I'm playing with words (5: 290). If we read Between the Acts attentive to such play, we discover work full of humor, laughter, and comedy. As in so much of Woolf's fiction, the tone of lyric seriousness (here associated primarily with Isa's poetic musings) risks obscuring the rich comedy; surely Woolf's humor has escaped many readers. Yet the spirit of linguistic play and the importance of humor to the work are signaled on the opening page where the narrator identifies the apparent sound of nightingale - bird of myth, poetry, and pathos - as actually only a daylight bird, chuckling. . . in sleep (3). That reference initiates what amounts to an anatomy of laughter in the novel, and it also initiates the bird imagery that is so clearly connected, in its many-tongued syllabling, with the novel's comic and polyphonic mingling of many voices. Between the Acts represents the culmination of Woolf's career-long exploration of contemporary festivity - the party consciousness (Diary 3: 12). It also represents the culmination of her experiments with narrative voice. The festive subject matter and the concern with narrative multiplicity come together in the humor and comedy of Woolf's most explicitly carnivalesque novel. That comedy arises from parody, incongruity, and linguistic play - all forms characteristic of what Bakhtin calls the public square (Dostoevsky 128). Bakhtin's concept of the novel as carnivalesque genre and his understanding of the relationship of laughter and festivity to novel form are illuminating in reading Woolf. Indeed, in discussing the function of parody in carnival, Bakhtin uses simile particularly appropriate to Between the Acts: images. . . parodied one another variously and from various points of view; it was like an entire system of crooked mirrors, elongating, diminishing, [and] distorting (Dostoevsky 127). The fullest treatment of Between the Acts as comic novel appears in an article by Melba Cuddy-Keane, who relates Woolf's use of chorus in the pageant to the use of the chorus in ancient Greek comedy. She argues that this comic mode is central to the questioning of authority in the novel as whole. My focus here is more explicitly on the parodic playlets of the pageant and the verbal play of the narrator and how these comic forms participate in the festive word of the carnivalesque novel. Greek comedy is, of course, an important source of Bakhtin's discussion of carnival and the village square. One of Bakhtin's important theoretical advances is to connect the ritualistic and folk sources of drama (noted by critics such as C. L. Barber and Northrop Frye, and classicists and anthropologists such as Jane Harrison and James Frazer) to the genre of the novel. Between the Acts tests the boundary of genre with its incorporation of lyric poetry and drama (both dramatized action and chorus). This mixing of genres is essential to the novel's festive character. Virginia Woolf may seem an odd candidate for Bakhtinian reading, especially in terms that emphasize carnival and laughter. After all, Woolf is hardly Rabelaisian writer. Yet I believe that Between the Acts is crucial work in the modern revivification of festive forms. Woolf's mingling of genres, aspiration toward plural narrator, and detailed attention to forms of laughter occur, significantly, in novel about village pageant, survival of folk carnival form. Woolf's search for plural and anonymous narrators, in this novel and the uncompleted Anon, represents departure from the modernist emphasis on individual consciousness, which is characteristic of the genre's move away from folk carnival sources. Similarly, her use of parody throughout this novel, as opposed to satire or irony, is consistent with comic vision of life in which all things are perceived as possessing comic, laughing aspect. The humor of Woolf's village pageant itself grows initially out of the double focus of the stage, which in turn points outside the pageant to the audience and the Pointz Hall residents. …

Lily Briscoe's Vision: The Articulation of Silence

When Lily Briscoe finishes her painting at end of Virginia Woolf's To Lighthouse, not only is she proving Charles Tansley wrong when he told her can't write, women can't paint (75), she is, for first time in Woolf's fiction, directly expressing female subjectivity. Previous characters have made attempt. Rachel Vinrace and Septimus Smith desperately searched for alternatives to gender roles they had been handed, but both were destroyed by effort. Only Lily Briscoe survives passage and reemerges, capable of articulating her vision of being a woman other than prescribed role of Woman.' That female subjectivity can be expressed or even exist has been a subject of much recent debate. Early deconstruction and psychoanalytic theories opposed humanistic concept of authentic, essential self capable of autonomy and unmediated experience, insisting that human consciousness is profoundly affected, if not completely formed, by ideology and language. How can a consciousness formed by a culture something outside that culture? Certainly Lacan's notion of language and human development preempts women from in any authentic, subjective way whatsoever. According to these theories, women are trapped in silence. Contemporary feminist theorists have found a middle ground in this controversy, which has perhaps been best expressed by Therese de Lauretis. She defines individual identity as an ongoing construction, not a fixed point, based on those relations-material, economic, interpersonal-which are in fact social and, in a larger perspective, historical. Meaning and subjectivity are not produced once and for all, but continually created in social practice. De Lauretis names this process experience (Alice 159), thus rescuing old feminist adage the personal is political. A gap, then, exists between cultural construct of Woman, which is fixed, and specific historical and personal of female person, which is site of engendering of female subject. Thus, women are in oscillation between figure Woman and their own daily ongoing experience, and can enunciate female subjectivity by from this gap, which de Lauretis terms speaking from elsewhere (Technologies 25). Elsewhere is not some real place