For the purposes of this subject, it is impracticable to attempt to read everything that Woolf wrote. You should be aiming to study at least two primary texts in depth. Do not overstretch yourself by attempting to cover too many of a writer’s primary texts. Remember you will have secondary, critical reading as well.
Woolf, Virginia Orlando: A Biography (1928). We have chosen this comic fantasy as a starting point, partly because it is accessible, and partly because it takes us straight to some of Woolf’s characteristic concerns. The 1992 film version may also be available. Any edition of the novel will be suitable. The edition used here is Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 [ISBN 9780141184272].
Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse (hereafter TTL) (1927). A central Woolf text. This novel constitutes a clear expression of Woolf’s dissent from nineteenth-century literary traditions. Any edition will be suitable. The edition used here is Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 [ISBN 9780141183411].
Barrett, Michelle (ed.) Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing. (London: The Women’s Press, 1979) [ISBN 0700433839]. A collection of Woolf’s feminist essays.
*Beer, Gillian Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996) [ISBN 0485111225]. An extremely useful collection of essays by one of the foremost Woolf critics.
Bowlby, Rachel Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997) [ISBN 0748608206].
Lee, Hermione The Novels of Virginia Woolf. (London: Holmes and Meir, 1977) [ISBN 0084190314X]. Now dated in terms of critical strategy, but a clear and well-researched treatment of Woolf’s novels
Roe, Susan and Susan Sellers (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) [ISBN 0521623936].
*Woolf, Virginia A Room of One’s Own (hereafter, AROO). (London: Grafton, 1978) [ISBN 058044493] Originally two lectures given at Girton and Newnham Colleges (1928). This is the best known of Woolf’s feminist polemics.
*Woolf, Virginia A Writer’s Diary (hereafter, AWD), edited by Leonard Woolf. (London: Panther, 1978) [ISBN 005804507]. Essential for any serious work on Woolf, this is Woolf’s account of the process of writing.
*Woolf, Virginia Selected Essays: The Crowded Dance of Modern Life. Vol. II. edited by Rachel Bowlby. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) [ISBN 014018564 X]. An excellent selection of Woolf’s essays with a useful introduction.
*Woolf, Virginia Collected Essays, volume 3. (Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1998) [ISBN 0701206683].
* Especially recommended
Virginia Woolf is one of the key figures in classical modernism. Her fictional work is usually seen as consisting of two kinds of book, the heavy-weight productions (like Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts and The Waves) and the lighter pieces (such as Flush and Orlando). Woolf herself contributed to this view, claiming in A Writer’s Day that the latter were written as a kind of light relief after the rigours of producing the ‘serious’ work.
In this chapter we shall be arguing that the lightweights have a great deal in common with the challenge to conventional realism that Woolf mounted in works like To the Lighthouse. In fact, the ‘lighter’ Orlando is actually a good introduction to understanding the radicalism of Woolf’s more self-consciously ‘experimental’ literature.
There is an immediate problem with Orlando, which has to do with genre. Woolf tells us that this book is ‘A Biography’ and, indeed, the narrator sounds like a biographer. The subject, Orlando, has been researched with astonishing thoroughness. The narrator insists on her own academic integrity. She treads ‘in the indelible footprints of truth’.
Activity
Collect further examples of how the biographer/narrator of Orlando attempts to persuade us of the authenticity of biography. Consider the function of lists (see, for instance, Chapter 2) in this connection.
The problem with this attempt at factuality and scholarship is that it lies. It is perfectly obvious that Orlando is an imagined fictional character and a fantastic one at that. He/she lives through four centuries, is 16 years old on the first page of the book and 36 years old on the last page, some 328 years later, having changed sex somewhere in the seventeenth century. This means that everything in Orlando which has the appearance of historical authenticity, objective research and intellectual rigour is actually fabrication.
Activity
Examine the Preface and the Index of Orlando in the light of the last sentence. You should see that the former is actually a mock Index and the latter a mock Preface. What effects is Woolf seeking to produce?
To some degree, the narrator herself (himself?), who apparently has great respect for facts and scientific method, recognises that factuality and objectivity are difficult to pin down. ‘Facts’ are often incomplete, or get lost or destroyed, or they offend the narrator’s moral sensibilities. The most complex ‘fact’ of all is the fact of human personality:
For she [Orlando] had a great variety of selves to call on, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand. (p.213)
It seems then that Woolf (who of course, needs to be distinguished from the Orlando narrator) is using the techniques and methods of biography to expose the fallibility, and perhaps even the pointlessness, of biography. The question is, why?
As well as claiming to be a biographer, the narrator of Orlando is also concerned with history-making. The two words ‘history’ and ‘biography’ are closely connected in the narrator’s mind and there is the suggestion that the methods of biography and history are broadly similar. But just as Orlando cannot be biography, it cannot be history either. For one thing, this book manages to ignore almost everything that historians think is historically important. It says virtually nothing about the English Civil War, or the Restoration, or the Industrial Revolution, or political reform and so on. Something of the narrator’s increasing frustration at traditional practices of history-making is apparent when Orlando first takes a train ride. She has never seen a train before. She gives:
…no thought to that stupendous invention which had (the historians say) ‘completely changed the face of Europe in the past 20 years’ (as indeed happens much more frequently than historians supposed). She noticed only that it was extremely smutty, rattled horribly; and the windows stuck. (p.190)
The ironic note is obvious and, as in the case of biography, there is the suggestion that history-making is defeated by reality in some sense, or, to put it another way, that history-making and reality are two different things.
Activity
Collect further examples of the ways in which Orlando subverts traditional history-making.
Orlando is clearly not what it purports to be (a history/biography). Perhaps it is possible to argue that Orlando is really a novel in the guise of something else. The problem with this is that Orlando also subverts traditions of the ‘conventional’ novel. It has a plot, but an unbelievable one. Its characters are more like caricatures. The narrator cannot be trusted. Her very first words about Orlando are: ‘He – for there could be no doubt of his sex…’ This establishes the first question mark about the narrator’s reliability and it does so in a big way, because identifying gender is a very slippery business in this book.
Activity
Consider this definition of a novel: ‘A work of narrative fiction of some length, nearly always in prose, and bearing a close resemblance to daily life in psychology, environment and timescale’ (The Longman Companion to English Literature). Make a list of the ways in which Woolf’s book subverts this definition.
Certainly Orlando alludes to novel-making, but it usually does so through parody and frequently for satirical purposes. There are parodies of broad styles, like the Gothic, and of individual novelists, like Sterne and Dickens. The following is a comic version of a Bronte melodrama:
[Was it] some hammer on an anvil, or was it a heart beating? Tick-tock, tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the anvil, or the heart in the middle of the earth; until, as she listened, she thought it changed to the trot of a horse’s hoofs; one, two, three, four, she counted; then she heard a stumble; then, as it came nearer and nearer, she could hear the crack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog in its hoofs. The horse was almost on her. She sat upright. Towering dark against the yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and falling about him, she saw a man on horseback. He started. The horse stopped.
– ‘Madam’, the man cried leaping to the ground, ‘you’re hurt!’
‘I’m dead, sir!’ she replied.
A few minutes later, they became engaged. (p.173–74)
One of the things which makes this comic is that it reveals the constructed, fictive nature of the novel, its unreality, its rootedness in popular taste and, in this case, in an ideology of sexuality, of relations between men and women.
Activity
Collect further examples of literary parodies and consider what their functions may be.
You should be seeing that Orlando takes liberties with a broad range of cultural practices: history, biography, and fiction-making. We still need to examine why it does so.
Activity
At this point you should consult AROO and Barrett’s Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing. Consider what Woolf has to say about the nature, status and gendering of these practices.
It is clear, particularly from A Room of One’s Own, that Woolf regards history, biography and fiction-making as under male ownership. Women have been caricatured as subjects and excluded as producers. Consider, for instance, this comment about women writers from AROO:
[Womens writers] had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey – whoever it may be never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. (pp.72–73)
This kind of view allows us to read Orlando as a radical intervention into the politics of culture. Woolf practices an ‘interference’ with, or subversion of, the production of history, biography and fiction-making, because they represent a culture which she, as a woman, is not represented by and does not identify with.
Activity
Clearly there are many places in Orlando where Woolf articulates a feminist agenda, most obviously on issues around gender. Collect evidence of this articulation. You should also realise at this point that Orlando was dedicated to Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf had a love affair. Orlando is dedicated to Sackville-West and the character, Orlando, is based on her. Find out about this relationship (consult Woolf’s letters). Consider how this biographical material affects your reading of Orlando.
It is important to realise that Orlando does not simply address feminist issues ‘sporadically’. We are suggesting that the whole thing, the form, the satirical tone, the elements of fantasy, the critical engagement with culture, all this ‘substance’ of Orlando is, in its entirety, a feminist enterprise – the point being that Woolf regards history, biography and literature as a usurping culture. Her sense of exclusion promotes her experimentalism and allows the production of this parodic fantasy of three centuries.
Activity
Are there any further contexts, besides this feminist one, in which Woolf’s subversion of cultural forms takes place?
Just as there are genre difficulties with Orlando, so there are similar problems with TTL. In AWD, Woolf tries to find a new word to describe her book, TTL, and postulates the term ‘elegy’. In fact, Woolf generally steers clear of the word ‘novel’ to describe her own work.
Activity
Consult AWD for illustrations of Woolf’s debate about terminology. At this point you should also read Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (in Collected Essays, volume 3). This clearly articulates Woolf’s dissent from the conventional realism (which she calls ‘materialism’) of her English male contemporaries: Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. You should consider what Woolf means by the term ‘modern fiction’, and by what means TTL achieves the status of ‘modern’.
Perhaps the most important statement in ‘Modern Fiction’ concerns Woolf’s sense that the conventional novel with its ‘plot’, ‘comedy’, ‘tragedy’, and ‘love interest’ is not ‘real’:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms…
Depicting ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ seems to be an essential ambition behind TTL. The novel is not technically interior monologue, because it is always mediated by a narrator, but the novel is somehow located inside the characters’ heads. However, co-existing with the seemingly random, fleeting qualities of the prose is a very tight and solid structure. This structure is shaped partly by the symbols which underpin the novel, for instance:
Activity
Consider how these and other symbols work in TTL.
A second structural problem is the relationship of part to part. Part I, for instance, ends with a kind of order, and with the household going to sleep. Part II opens with chaos and the household waking up, 10 years later. Part III fulfils the promise of the journey to the lighthouse that was made in Part I, and so on.
Activity
Consider further ways in which the parts of the novel relate to each other. Pay particular attention to Part II, which seems to represent the operation of ‘pure’ time: that is, time outside human consciousness. You might consider why, in this section, events which would seem to be of great importance (the deaths of Mrs Ramsay, Pru and Andrew, for instance) are delivered in parenthesis, as if they were somehow incidental.
It might have struck you how the style and structure of this novel is echoed in Lily Briscoe’s comments about art:
The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. (p.186)
Lily’s ‘bolts of iron’ seem to correspond to the novel’s structure; her ‘surface’ to the representation of ‘thinking’. This correspondence raises the possibility that Lily is a kind of spokeswoman for the practice of making art, which would suggest that TTL is in part about the conditions of its own making. When Lily tries to ‘resurrect’ Mrs Ramsay through her painting in Part III, she is emulating Woolf, as it were, for Mr and Mrs Ramsay are Woolf’s attempt, in part, at ‘resurrecting’ her own mother and father.
TTL is very much concerned with art as process. It does ‘represent’ reality, but it also interrogates the process of representing reality. The novel opens with Mrs Ramsay and James, framed by a window (like a painting?), being painted by Lily. There is much debate in the novel about styles of painting and about abstract art and its opposition to realism. Charles Tansley’s comment that ‘woman can’t paint, can’t write’ echoes through the text. Above all, the last section of the novel is taken up with Lily trying to finish the painting of Mrs Ramsay and James that she had begun ten years earlier. The following extract concerns Lily’s initial brushstrokes:
For the mass loomed before her; it protruded; she felt it pressing on her eyeballs. Then, as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were spontaneously squirted, she began precariously dipping among the blues and umbers, moving her brush hither and thither, but it was now much heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was dictated to her…by what she saw so that while her hand quivered with life, this rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it in its current. Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things… (p.174)
Activity
Analyse this passage, paying particular attention to the diction. What is Woolf saying here about the nature of the creative process?
A self-conscious concern with its own production is characteristic of modernist art. The centrality of this concern to TTL is perhaps best suggested in Part III of the novel, which concludes with two kinds of related completion. The journey to the lighthouse is finally completed, and so is Lily’s painting. The final act of the novel is Lily’s final brushstroke.
Activity
The last paragraph should indicate just how important the subject of art as process is in TTL. When you are considering this aspect of the novel, it is important to consider how the two acts of completion which conclude TTL are related. You should also ask yourself why it is that Mrs Ramsay’s triumph at the end of Part I (her dinner-party) should be expressed in terms so similar to Lily’s parallel triumph at the end of Part III (the completion of her painting).
Having studied the essential reading and some of the recommended reading, you should be able to:
1. In what ways does ‘modernist’ literature differ from its ‘traditional’ counterpart? You may answer with reference to any modernist writer of the period.
2. Explore the relation between feminism and form in the work of Virginia Woolf or any writer of the period.
3. Consider the relationship between history and story-telling in at least two works of any modern writer.
4. Compare the treatment of either sexuality or the relation between inner and outer worlds in the work of any modern writer.
The above comments imply that both the style and form of TTL respond to feminist issues. The ‘interiority’ of the novel, for instance, is a product of Woolf’s sense of the inadequacy of more traditional representations of ‘external reality’. Such representations acquire their status partly, Woolf argues, because they have been created predominantly by male writers. Such issues are also reflected in the content of the novel; in the characterisation of Lily and relationship between Mr and Mrs Ramsay, for example; or in Lily Briscoe’s struggles as a woman painter. This is one important link between Orlando and TTL. It might be worthwhile focusing on the relations between these two texts. Is it possible, for instance, to argue that the former is a comic version of ideas which are treated more seriously in the latter?
You might also consider Woolf’s treatment of time and nature, especially in Part II of TTL, where both seem to be blind, impersonal and destructive forces.
Bearing in mind that there is some sense in which TTL is ‘autobiographical’, you might consider the problematic question of the relationship between the text and the author’s life.
At this point there are a number of ways in which your work on Woolf generally might develop:
a. You might decide to extend your work by reading others of Woolf’s novels, perhaps later works like The Waves or Between the Acts.
b. You might decide to develop a topic study out of this author study. For instance, you might now feel strongly placed to tackle the issue of feminist fiction in the modern period. This would involve some further historical contextualising, or making a comparative study of later women writers, like Sylvia Plath or Angela Carter. It would involve consulting feminist theories of literature. Or you might decide to use your work on Woolf to develop an approach to the meaning of the terms ‘modernist’, ‘modern’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodern’.