Virginia Woolf

by Ruth Gruber

  Upon this superb detachment, this critical harmony, she measures the greatness of her “spiritual mothers”. Lady Winchilsea, Addison’s contemporary, had fallen short in failing to obliterate her conflicts, to strike harmony with man. Distorted by her critical struggle, her mind was “harassed and distracted with hates and grievances. The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the ‘opposing faction’; men are hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to do—which is to write … Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hot within her.”19

  Vital for her conflict of tradition versus experiment, is the force with which Virginia Woolf is drawn to the women who repel literary influence. Originality, as the romanticists had conceived it, unreceptive and highly fitful, attracts her; she praises Charlotte Brontë because she “at least owed nothing to the reading of many books.”20 This freedom from traditions seems to have a paradoxical charm for Virginia Woolf in search of a maternal guide. Yet she blames this very “obstinate integrity” for the “flaw” in this “woman who … had more genius in her than Jane Austen.”21 Like almost every woman novelist, except Jane Austen, she was broken in the desperacy of her war with a masculine world. With her measurement of superb detachment, Virginia Woolf is persuaded that restless and unhappy, the novelist Charlotte Brontë “will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly … She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.”22 Lacking that serene objectivity, she fails because her art becomes too polemic, too subjective, too confessional.

  The will for self-expression, whose frustration stifled the women of the past, Virginia Woolf pursues with renewed consciousness. Like her own analysis of Montaigne, she “wishes only to communicate (her) soul.”23 Free from unhealthful repression, to pour out the “poetry that is still denied outlet” in woman.24 But what is this poetry, checked by the critics, and peculiar to women? What form does it have which makes it irrefutably feminine? Granted the traditional characteristics of woman, as her emotional rather than logical aspect of life, her strong sensitivities must find unimpeded expression. Hers must be a style molded to her feminine apperceptions, lyrical, poetic or diffusely narrative rather than constrained by strict laws of formal selectivity. A style supplying imagery for her associations and musical flowing rhythms for her emotions.

  Obviously it is a style of pure romanticism. And several contradictions present themselves against a romantic style as uniquely feminine. First, women have shown that they are not all emotional and obscurely associative. There are women rising up in science, in philosophy, in aesthetic criticism, who show a clarity and logic which repudiate all these feminine traditions. But such women, it may be argued, are not typical, at least for the contemporaries. With “masculine” mentality, their style becomes “masculine”: abstract, structural and urgently clear. A rhythmic style would be anomalous. Since the traditional distinctions between man and woman, as the traditions of man’s objective clarity and woman’s irrational intuition still hold, these women must yet be crudely classified as masculine. An emotional romantic style in which most women can find truest expression, would still obtain as feminine. A deeper contradiction is derivative; this romantic style was created not by women but by men. Logically then, women seeking purely feminine expression, must reject it as most of them reject rigid formalism. But again the old traditions of what is masculine and what feminine are helpful; the men who created the romantic form, were, in their sensitivity and emotional attitude to life, more effeminate than manly. Having aptitudes similar to those of women, they perfected a “feminine” style which women could wield. It is no accident that the influence of women and their own creativeness appear far stronger in a romantic epoch than in a classic or naturalistic one. It is there that they find deepest expression, deepest sympathy.

  Under the law of polarity, of poetic action and critical reaction, this feminine style is negated by a correlative “masculine” criticism, demanding a verisimilitude in the treatment of life, a denial of metaphors used only as ornament, and a prose which is neither metrical poetry nor the monotonous jargon of a legal code. Such criticism, following the naturalists and the classicists, and characteristically convinced that it alone has found the absolute truth in style, rejects this feminine romanticism as sentimental and pretentiously emotional. It substitutes for women’s rhapsody, restraint; for their rhythms, apparently bald or logical structure; and for their dreams, tangible reality.

  Within this polarity, Virginia Woolf struggles for her style, conscious that it has broken other women before her.

  __________

  1 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 136.

  2 Ibid. p. 88.

  3 “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” p. 19.

  4 “Tom Jones” Book X. p. 463.

  5 “Orlando” p. 75; p. 236.

  6 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 110.

  7 Ibid. p. 160.

  8 Ibid. p. 114.

  9 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 112.

  10 Ibid. p. 112.

  11 Ibid. p. 160.

  12 Ibid. p. 160.

  13 “The Common Reader” p. 108.

  14 Ibid. p. 108.

  15 Ibid. p. 108.

  16 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 85.

  17 Ibid. p. 88.

  18 Ibid. p. 102.

  19 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 88.

  20 The Common-Reader”: “Jane Eyre” p.223.

  21 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 104.

  22 Ibid. p. 104.

  23 “The Common-Reader”: “Montaigne” p. 96.

  24 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 116.

  THE STRUGGLE FOR A STYLE

  THE PROBLEM OF STYLE which has concerned Virginia Woolf, reflects, with deepened intensity, the speculative problems of aesthetics. Vacillating reactions from poetic romanticism to terseness and objectivity, are as indigenous to her conflicts and progress as they are to a literary age. She is driven to break her forms as soon as she has created them. Her experiments, her variations and recurrences reveal not only the urge to discover new possibilities, but a deeper discontent and lack of assurance. The lyrical cry, echoed throughout her works, faint at times, at others swelling relentlessly, evinces an ebb and flow of self-confidence, of doubt, of attempted change, and grim resolution.

  In the irreconcilable alteration from her first novel, “The Voyage Out” to “Night and Day” her second, the lash of masculine criticism seems to have fallen. Where she rollicked in her first novel, she criticizes in her second. The rebellion of youth, the desire to be unrestrained by critical traditions is suppressed. In bending to the critic and evading future stings, she endangers her original beliefs, her original style, her integrity as a creative woman. She attempts to subvert her poetry into prose and her images into facts. She becomes ratiocinative like the critics themselves. She writes slowly and thoughtfully where before she had loosened herself in the torrent of poetic soaring and youthful love.

  The change in her style looms large in the change in her heroines, in the women who interest her. Rachel of “The Voyage Out” is a dreamer, fantastic, musical, in love with Beethoven and Bach. Her romantic flights from reality, her lyrical feminine character find their setting on board the ship “Euphrosyne,” breaking its way through the eternity of water and air. Landed in a distant English island, Rachel’s antisocial appetencies, her love of solitude are developed in a microcosmic society of vacationists and pioneers who have voyaged out. With tragic fatalism, she falls in love with a would-be novelist and is torn between sacrificing either her identity or her love. The conflict seems insoluble; death resolves it. Even her death is fitting to her personality in its fever, its delirium, its romantic hallucinations.

  On the other hand, Katherine Hilberry of “Night and Day” emerges mathematical, scientific,
precise. Her life is spent in bringing order and precision into the chaos of a poetic house. Again love creates the conflict; but in her reflective logic, she finds the happiness denied Rachel. Sensible, unruffled by passions, restrained, she consents to marry a man whom she does not love, but who offers her intellectual freedom. Analytic to the end, she finally ascertains where completion for her lies, and marries the poor lawyer, Denham, whom she loves. Between the two women, as between the two novels, lies a difference in observations, in reactions, in a concept of life, comprehended in their style.

  The writing of the first, immature novel with its reverberation of poetic feminine imagery, of rhythmic cadences, of words highly charged with suggestion, is reminiscent of the Romantic Victorians. The simple “like” images, as in Ruskin, fall almost invariably at the end of the sentence to create a satisfying cadence, viz:

  “At this point the cab stopped, for it was in danger of being crushed like an egg-shell.”1

  “The argument was spilt irretrievably about the place like a bucket of milk.”2

  “The inside of his brain was still rising and falling like the sea on the stage.”3

  “Relics of humour still played over her face like moonshine.”4

  “The world floated like an apple in a tub.”5

  Analyzed, such figures recall associations of simple phenomena in nature, or, as the “apple in a tub”, of childhood games and discoveries. They show a feminine poetic identity with nature, and lack sophisticated allusions to psychology, literature or the other arts. Their naïveté would verify the Schopenhauer definition of woman’s childishness. The longer metaphors, being less restrained, realize a peculiar feminine imagery, with the rhythm and tonal diction of lyrical verse.

  “She was more lonely than the caravan crossing the desert; she was infinitely more mysterious, moving by her own power and sustained by her own resources. The sea might give her death or some unexampled joy, and none would know of it. She was a bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men; in her vigour and purity, she might be likened to all beautiful things, for as a ship she had a life of her own.”6

  That the boat “might be likened to all beautiful things” seems an acknowledgement of a vagueness in her sensation of beauty; a vagueness which she does not qualify either because her mind lacks one definite objectified image, (a feminine tradition,) or she is conscious that her associations, as that of the ship as a virgin, are literary pickings, unassimilated.

  Through unusual comparisons, she blocks out her characters in this early novel. The comic figures, like Mr. Pepper, a misanthropic bibliophile, are described figuratively, with the domestic associations of an observant, quick-witted woman.

  “His heart’s a piece of old shoe leather.”7

  “He’s like this,” said Rachel, “lighting on a fossilised fish in a basin, and displaying it.”8

  “They saw Mr. Pepper as though he had suddenly loosened his clothes, and had become a vivacious and malicious old ape.”9

  Or Mr. Dalloway, the politician, weighing the social ameliorator against the artist, is described with feminine minuteness, in sleep. “He looked like a coat hanging at the end of a bed; there were all the wrinkles, and the sleeves and trousers kept their shape though no longer filled out by legs and arms. You can then best judge the age and state of the coat.”10 Even the tragic figures, like Rachel, are characterized metaphorically. Seasick, where her “sensations were the sensations of potatoes in a sack on a galloping horse”, she had “just enough consciousness to suppose herself a donkey on the summit of a moor in a hail-storm, with its coat blown into furrows; then she became a wizened tree, perpetually driven back by the salt Atlantic gale.”11 Revealing both a poetic and feminine mentality, this early imagery of donkeys and galloping horses is curiously reminiscent of the nursery with wooden toys, its walls or its illustrated story books. The desire to remain unsophisticated, finds expression, often unconsciously, in associations of childhood. The return to nature in literary art implies a retrogression even beyond puberty; only the child is untainted, being least removed from natural innocence. Virginia Woolf’s spontaneous imagery draws largely from this native childish consciousness. But in reverting from nature to literary sources, her images become less plastic and more abstract, tending to grow forced or intellectual or cryptically obscure.

  By their very nature, associations usually lack exactitude, the crucible of “masculine” criticism. It is a curious commonplace that as the mind matures, it recoils from vague suggestions, however pictorial, and demands a more literal truth. This individual change is but a reflection of the evolution of the race, expressing itself first in carving or scribbling images, and then in words so limited and absolute that they can be compiled within a standard dictionary. Writing her first novel in the language of poetic youth, Virginia Woolf, through a desire for progress or through critical pressure, converts her style, and writes her second novel in the language of ratiocination, with little imagery and less rhythm.

  Her style in “Night and Day” is suggestive partly of the restraint of a Jane Austen, and especially of the intellectual periods of a poet like Wordsworth or Coleridge, writing in prose. A brilliancy of color and of sound is restrained; there is a conscious attempt to write prosaically, denying emotional outbursts. A sober logic marks the whole, typified ingeniously in the heroine, who “preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.”12 Apparent in this sentence lies Virginia Woolf’s analysis of her own conversion; she is maturing, demanding dictionary values; her early prose, however sincere, has become vague and unsatisfying to her.

  The difference in these two styles, a difference in accepted feminine and masculine expression, is vividly portrayed by a comparison of the first paragraphs of both novels. An involuntary self-consciousness in the author makes the early pages of a book almost an inevitable standard for the complete work. The predominating style, if it has been at all premeditated, is generally characterized here and most easily disintegrated. The mold is set; its limitations and its potentialities are conspicuous; the sentence structure and the atmosphere are strongly apprehended with their suggestion of imagery, rhythm, tone-color or stoic restraint. In “The Voyage Out” the first few pages leap in their action, with traditional feminine irrelevancy, from one surprise to another. In emotional suggestive diction, mysterious hints of a possible quarrel between husband and wife are enclosed in Ruskinian rhythms, droll didacticisms, imagery, and poetic, wandering observations.

  “As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyer’s clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.

  “One afternoon in the beginning of October when the traffic was becoming brisk a tall man strode along the edge of the pavement with a lady on his arm. Angry glances struck upon their backs … But some enchantment had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice and unpopularity …

  “The embankment juts out in angles here and there, like pulpits; instead of preachers, however, small boys occupy them, dangling string, dropping pebbles, or launching wads of paper for a cruise. With their sharp eye for eccentricity, they were inclined to think Mr. Ambrose awful; but the quickest witted cried ‘Bluebeard!’ as he passed …

  “Although Mrs. Ambrose stood quite still, much longer than is natural, the little boys let her be. Some one is always looking into the river near Waterloo Bridge; a couple will stand there talking for half an hour on a fine afternoon; most people, walking for pleasure, contemplate for three minutes; when, having compared the occasion with other occasions, or made some sentence, they pass on. Sometimes the flats and churches and hotels of Westminster are like the
outlines of Constantinople in a mist; sometimes the river is an opulent purple, sometimes mud-coloured, sometimes sparkling blue like the sea … Then there struck close upon her ears —

  Lars Porsena of Clusium

  By the nine Gods he swore—

  and then more faintly, as if the speaker had passed her on his walk—

  That the Great House of Tarquin Should suffer wrong no more.”13

  The lyrical feminine tone permeating the novel is definitely set here, in the colorfulness of the diction, in the strength of the verbs of action and the vivid adjectives. Feminine too are the profuse observations, the comparisons and the musical rhythm. But in her second novel, the language becomes denotative rather than suggestive, the sentences involved and architecturally constructed. In place of the melodic “opulent purple” and the romantic “outlines of Constantinople in a mist” are such Latinities as “unoccupied faculties” and “unmitigated truth.”

  “It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other young ladies of her class, Katherine Hilberry was pouring out tea. Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning and this rather subdued moment, and played with the things one does voluntarily and normally in the daylight. But although she was silent, she was evidently mistress of a situation which was familiar enough to her, and inclined to let it take its way for the six hundredth time, perhaps, without bringing into play any of her unoccupied faculties. …