Virginia Woolf

by Ruth Gruber

  Her style-consciousness reveals to her the danger of incoherence in this rich hurling together of words and images. After a long winding exposition of the incongruities and mysteries in nature, that “the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s,” or “we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again”, she breaks her form, and with the personal intrusion of a romantic essayist, acknowledges not only “the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence”, but the feminine confusion of unassimilated images in her mind: “a piece of policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil.” “A perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us,”46 is her jocular self-analysis.

  Through the medium of healthy humor, she has found herself. In laughing at her conflict, she has risen above it. She perceives that there is truth in each phase of it, that romanticism is not a deeper stylistic experience than realism, or that material fact is not more absolute than the imagination. It is only in ascertaining where, by natural impulses, she belongs, that she can write with the integrity implicit in greatness. The doubt which she satirizes in Orlando after wavering miserably between “plain and figured phrases”, she has herself experienced, like almost every poet Orlando, as a Victorian woman, loses confidence in her vision and style; oppressed by critical standards, she turns to other writers in perplexity. “Here came by a pair of tight scarlet trousers—how would Addison have put that? Here came two dogs dancing on their hind legs. How would Lamb have described that? For reading Sir Nicholas and his friends … they made one feel—it was an extremely uncomfortable feeling—one must never, never say what one thought … They made one feel, she continued, that one must always, always write like somebody else … and though I’m spiteful enough, I could never learn to be as spiteful as all that, so how can I be a critic and write the best English prose of my time?”47 With a violent “Damn it all!” she overturns the influence of the critic and determines to give expression to the realities she has discovered. “Enforcing upon herself the fact”—a fact which Virginia Woolf acknowledges through all her later works and repeats almost literally in the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” “that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it’s something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop: that’s what it is—a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy—it’s ecstasy that matters.”48 She is driven to this decision by the strength of her natural impulses. She returns to that early state of romantic exuberance, of feminine intuition and a dreamy nature-worship. Typifying the Victorian romanticists, Orlando now revels in night and moonlight, where sensuous objects grow indistinct and intangible visions seem to usurp the deeper reality. “Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.”49 Orlando has struggled between light and darkness, between romanticism and reality, certain now that darkness is her native realm. At last she can give unrestrained expression to the poetry singing within her. She obliterates the critic and his attempt to expose this darkness as a world of shadowy creations, which fall like ghosts before a penetrating searchlight.

  When, in integrity, Orlando achieves greatness, she weighs the long sought-for external success with her own impulses, her need for self-expression. “What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”50 She has experienced the greatest happiness possible to the idealistic poet, “the voice answering the voice”, poetry for its own sake, poetry for communication and self-expression. It is this revelation, which now suffuses Virginia Woolf. “Orlando” appears as a great confession of its author’s struggles and her realization of clarity and peace. It lacks that complete objectivity, that detachment of self which she thinks to find in Shakespeare or Jane Austen. But Virginia Woolf does not lose herself in violence or condemnation. If she is bitter against the critical Nick Greene, avenging herself upon the critics who have attempted to impede her, she ridicules Orlando too. Her ability to laugh at herself has saved her from destruction or despair. Through a humorous though profound self-analysis, she has absolved herself from struggles. She has achieved that psychic stability which subdues restlessness and eliminates revolt. Writing with the power of persuasion, she can stand above all constrictions, serenely impervious. Like Orlando, she cringes no longer to critics; periods of doubt and perplexity, recurring inevitably perhaps, she has learned to hold under check. While not insolently deaf to criticism and dissent, she has ascertained the style in which she finds complete ease for expression. As a woman and a dreamer, she gives vent to her imagination, repressing not her visions but a vagueness in expressing them. She has not lost her fire, but learned to control it, possessing eloquence without bombast, imagery without becoming extravagant or fatiguing.

  __________

  1 “The Voyage Out” p. 6.

  2 Ibid. p. 34.

  3 Ibid. p. 80.

  4 Ibid. p. 79.

  5 Ibid. p. 80.

  6 Ibid. p. 29.

  7 “The Voyage Out” p. 14.

  8 Ibid. p. 13.

  9 Ibid. p. 11.

  10 Ibid. p. 68.

  11 Ibid. p. 78.

  12 “Night and Day” p. 40.

  13 “The Voyage Out” pp. 1-3.

  14 “Night and Day” pp. 1-2.

  15 “The Voyage Out” p. 5.

  16 “Night and Day” p. 16.

  17 “Night and Day” p. 7.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Ibid. p. 379.

  20 Ibid. p. 365.

  21 Ibid.

  22 “Night and Day” p. 365.

  23 Ibid. p. 287.

  24 “Night and Day” p. 49.

  25 “Orlando” p. 62.

  26 “Orlando” p. 62.

  27 Ibid. p. 69.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Ibid. p. 31.

  30 Ibid. p. 13.

  31 “Orlando” p. 121.

  32 Ibid. p. 121.

  33 Ibid. p. 31.

  34 Ibid. p. 80.

  35 “Orlando” p. 84.

  36 Ibid. p. 85.

  37 Ibid. p. 86.

  38 Ibid. p. 87.

  39 “Orlando” p. 87.

  40 Ibid. p. 87.

  41 Ibid. p. 87.

  42 Ibid. p. 157.

  43 Ibid. p. 45.

  44 “Orlando” p. 16.

  45 Ibid. p. 17.

  46 Ibid. p. 66.

  47 “Orlando” p. 242.

  48 Ibid. p. 245.

  49 Ibid. p. 276.

  50 Ibid. p. 274.

  LITERARY INFLUENCES: THE FORMATION OF A STYLE

  THE DANGER IN CHOOSING literary influences, Virginia Woolf perceives, conscious that the great stylists of the past have in the main been men. The woman novelist cannot return only to the women of the past. It is in the men, in the poets and the masculine rhetoricians, that she is taught to seek her molds. However feminine Virginia Woolf’s aspect of life may be, her form is still precariously influenced; she must still confine herself within the frame which man has built for his own needs, the frame of the novel, the lyric or the drama. Even her selection of a form apparently adaptable to woman, the novel, necessitates concession. Having found in the history of style no artistic cast which was irrefutably feminine, she is forced, within womanly restrictions, to accommodate herself to man’s peculiarities, to his diction and the structure he created for his thoughts and emotions.

  To maintain her integrity, her poetic womanhood, she selects those men as literary influence whose style woman can wield with least constraint. Characteristically, she studies not the classical Attic writers but the Asiatic ones; not Dryden but Burke or Gibbon; not Pope but Shelley.

  A style is analyzed as it is the c
onsummation of those which have preceded it. Even the sportive or revolutionary experiments are evaluated as reactions to tradition and only then comprehended in their singularity. That not only muffled traces of the great stylists of the past appear in Virginia Woolf’s novels, but direct citations and arguments in their defence, is an instrumental consideration of her writing. Her motive, like the traditional artist, is to recreate these influences, manifesting then with what integrity or conscious plagiarism she has schooled herself.

  Fresh from the lecture hall, or the advice of tutors, she is, in her first novel, most obviously colored by masculine and academic influence. Gibbon, Burke, Shelley, Milton, Wordsworth and Shakespeare are discussed, debated, admired and defended. Gibbon, a master of the grand style, she envies with the homesickness of a modern who believes perfection to lie dead in the past. “A whole procession of splendid sentences”1 from the “Decline and Fall”, she visions as flawless soldiers, entering Hirst’s “capacious brow … marching through his brain in order … until the entire regiment had shifted its quarters.”2 Rachel is to be educated to understand Gibbon, since most women lack either the training or the ability. A typical passage is even quoted from him, characterizing his flowing technique. It is a trait enviably sought by Virginia Woolf in her early formation of a style. Rachel, reading the book beneath a tree “with a feeling that to open and read would certainly be a surprising experience, … turned the historian’s page and read that.—

  “His generals, in the early part of his reign, attempted the reduction of Aethiopia and Arabia Felix. They marched near a thousand miles to the south of the tropic; but the heat of the climate soon repelled the invaders and protected the unwarlike natives of those sequestered regions …

  “Never had any words been so vivid and so beautiful—Arabia Felix— Aethiopia.”3 Her appreciation, her emotional analysis of the Victorian stylist, is significant for Virginia Woolf’s early inclinations. In her enthusiasm for names with musical alliteration, she shows a distinct romantic heritage. She attempts to imitate the musical device used by Poe in “Ulalume”, by giving the characters in this first novel, liquid names like Rachel Vinrace, Helen, Evelyn, Terence, and Clarissa—a reminiscence of that earlier Richardson figure of utter feminine sentimentality. Her romanticism reaches its peak in the name of the ship “Euphrosyne”. As she develops, the names of her characters grow curiously less romantic and in her last novel, the “Waves”, are as uneuphonious, as solid, as Susan, Jinny and Rhoda.

  As she grows more certain of her style, she no longer mentions the literary giants as though she were defending them before an iconoclastic world or repeating the admiration schooled in her. She uses other writers largely to suggest the personality of the character who admires them. William of “Night and Day” precise, fastidious, with a flair for classic formulas, reads Pope. Ralph, his converse, a natural talent and informed in plants and flowers, reads Sir Thomas Browne. Long quotations, as that from Gibbon in her first novel, decrease into a few lines from the poets, especially from Shelley or Shakespeare. Her interest in a model prose style, implicit in the rhetorical masters, disappears as conversation from her novels, and demanding expression, becomes material for essays. Her novels then are freed from the oppression of literary dogmatism. In “The Common Reader” a collection of her essays, she gives vent to her admiring concern for the writers who have in some way influenced her; for Chaucer, Addison, Defoe, Montaigne, the Duchess of Newcastle, Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Conrad, and Sophocles, for “it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”4 The sort of appreciative propaganda which characterized her first novel, is assimilated slowly as she matures. Hints of it are still apparent in “Night and Day”. She insinuates an indirect defence of Dostoievsky, whose “Stavrogin’s Confession” she has translated, by having Rodney exhort the romantic Cassandra “to read Pope in preference to Dostoievsky, until her feeling for form was more highly developed.”5 Shakespeare is not only defended by Mrs. Hilberry, a poetic Victorian, but she conceives a project of making him public property. With street corner propaganda, she will lower him from the exclusive aristocracy of the critics and make him common good. “I should like to stand at that crossing all day long and say: ‘People, read Shakespeare!’ ”6

  Burke’s influence is felt in the careful selectivity of her diction, gaining suggestive power by its rhythm, its tone and its compositional relationship. A description, reminiscent of his purple prose, effects its colorfulness at times through a strict adherence to the objects described, and at others through metaphorical associations.

  “When the Spaniards came down from their drinking, a fight ensued, the two parties churning up the sand, and driving each other into the surf. The Spaniards, bloated with fine living upon the fruits of the miraculous land, fell in heaps; but the hardy Englishmen, tawny with sea-voyaging, hairy for lack of razors, with muscles like wire, fangs greedy for flesh, and fingers itching for gold, despatched the wounded, drove the dying into the sea, and soon reduced the natives to a state of superstitious wonderment … From the interior came Indians with subtle poisons, naked bodies, and painted idols; from the sea came vengeful Spaniards and rapacious Portuguese; exposed to all these enemies (though the climate proved wonderfully kind and the earth abundant) the English dwindled away and all but disappeared.”7

  The Asiatic flush of this description is gained through the stylistic devices which she has learned from the male rhetoricians, the finesses of balancing, of parallel construction, and triads. Comparing it with Burke’s famous description of the horrors of Hyder Ali, reveals a resemblance not only in the machination, but in the rhythmic rise and fall and the sustained rapidity of motion.

  “Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank or sacredness of function, fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities; but escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine.”8

  Burke’s unusual denotation of the word “compounding” in his illustrious sentence: “compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into one black cloud”9 has become a constant in her active vocabulary. She repeats the borrowed word in the mold of triads in which Burke had set it: “The power is a mysterious one compounded of beauty, birth, and some rarer gift.”10

  Other words made memorable by some poet or famous prose writer, are accepted synthetically in her work. “Innumerable”, a favorite of Wordsworth’s and of the romantic poets, suggests to her such liquid rhythm that she constructs euphuistic balance by doubling it repeatedly.

  “The housemaids, the innumerable housemaids, the bedrooms, the innumerable bedrooms.”11

  “Innumerable beadles were filling innumerable keys into well-oiled locks.”12

  “Her ears were now distracted by the jingling of innumerable bells on the heads of innumerable horses.”13

  Echoes of the early grammars she has studied, with their tabulated lists of connotative and denotative diction, their models of rhetorical perfection, persist from her earliest novel to her latest.

  Just as famous words of literature become synthetic in her style, so famous phrases are wholly incorporated, given only a slight turn for originality. Milton’s “Sonnet on his Blindness” is appropriated to “the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide—a small one but dear to the possessor—perishing and with it my self, my so
ul.”14 Stevenson’s confession of having “played the sedulous ape” is converted into “the ape is too distant to be sedulous.”15 Shelley’s “Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples”:

  “I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care” are literally repeated in her last novel “The Waves”. “I am not going to lie down and weep away a life of care,”16 while various lines now “classic” from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” appear throughout all her later novels.

  “Should I, after tea and cakes and

  ices,

  Have the strength to force the

  moment to its crisis?”

  suggests a similar thought in “The Waves”. “Now let me try … before we rise, before we go to tea, to fix the moment in one effort of supreme endeavour.”17 Or “Prufrock’s” last image

  “I have seen them riding seaward

  on the waves

  Combing the white hair of the

  waves blown back”.

  is startlingly recalled in “Jacob’s Room”: “and life became something that the courageous mount and ride out to sea on— the hair blown back.”18

  Her manner of adapting these literary influences reveals a significant feature of her work. Deeply style-conscious, hers is a style founded upon wide reading, upon a study of the classicists with the determination to learn from them and find patterns for her own writing. Her method is not only that of recreating but of direct imitation, either conscious or unconscious. Where it is conscious, as the Miltonic reproduction, her imitation is mainly for the sake of effect. The great men need no correction; repeating their thought, she repeats also their expression. Whether these thoughts and their related form are peculiarly masculine or peculiarly feminine here does not concern her; they are the deep truths of life, and if a man has given them perfect expression, she is willing to accept this masculine mold. Where her influences become subconscious, as the influence of Burke, they form for the most part the groundwork of her own personal style. But where they are unassimilated, as the images from T. S. Eliot, they appear almost to be plagiarisms, modified by slight individuality.