by Ruth Gruber
Not only the history of literary influences is portrayed in “Orlando” but traces of all the styles in which Virginia Woolf has composed and is yet to experiment, are suggested and developed. The romantic, imaginative, emotionally feminine writing, discerned in her first novel, is parodied in Orlando’s early style. His conversion to “plain phrases” recalls the attempted restraint of “Night and Day” where Virginia Woolf had sought to express a profundity of thought in a structural logic. “Orlando” itself, the mock biography, follows in the footsteps of Lamb and the subjective, tongue-in-their-cheek, romantic essayists. Hints of the stream-of-consciousness, explored in the later novels appear in Orlando’s constant reminiscences of the past. Impressionism is suggested in the kaleidoscopic description, the flashes of rapid completed observations. “Orlando” is thus seen not only as the final acknowledgement of Virginia Woolf’s literary influences, but as the core of her own stylistic development.
An analysis of literary influences is incomplete, almost fruitless, unless it solves the consequent problem of originality, the problem which every poet sets himself. A complete repudiation of influences is, considering Shakespeare’s borrowings, absurd. The masterful artist is known by the influences he selects, by the unwavering certainty with which he finds the influences he needs and converts them to his own use. Essentially it is the crisis of the literary apprentice, forced to determine when, for his own identity, he must free himself from adulation. With her reverence for the great masters, Virginia Woolf faces the problem precariously. Her first two novels appear as the trial and error stage of her development, the tasting and probing. Uncertainly, she accepts and rejects both traditions and influences. This is the stage of pendulum theses and antitheses in the formation of her style. After the uncertainty, the critical struggle, comes the thankful stage where she finds herself, where she liberates herself from servility. Perceiving where her talents and her limitations lie, she can ascertain the level upon which she stands, and walk securely among her equals. Herein lies her originality, her integrity. Despite her experiments in modern forms, her writing becomes more similar in her succeeding books; the oscillation of the first two novels has passed. She does not obliterate influences; traces of the moderns, of Bergson, Proust, Joyce and T. S. Eliot are obvious. But now they are bent to serve her needs rather than to inhibit her through parasitic worship.
Although she classifies herself with the Georgian writers, the contemporaries of the reigning king, she is too deeply rooted in the romantic past to be called a strict Georgian. Her innovations are not revolutionary enough; she does not break with the past. She analyzes the Georgian rebellion against the literary convention: “Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated”42 yet she herself retains all the formulas. The Georgians, she feels, fall short because the “convention ceases to be a means of communication between writer and reader, and becomes an obstacle and an impediment.”43 Having determined for herself the weakness of contemporary literature, she seeks to evade its pitfalls by retaining the conventions of the past. She refuses to follow the herd blindly. She rejects the urge to be modern at any cost and take hand in “the smashing and the crashing … the prevailing sound of the Georgian age—rather a melancholy one if you think what melodious days there have been in the past, if you think of Shakespeare and Milton and Keats or even of Jane Austen and Thackeray and Dickens; if you think of the language, and the heights to which it can soar when free, and see the same eagle captive, bald, and croaking.”44
Through her own classification of herself as well as through the evolution of her literary influences, she is seen as a transition writer, a bridge between the old and the new. English literary style, the heritage of the classic poets and prose writers, is inherent in her word-groups, her imagery, her rhythm. And in her meditations and philosophy, she is the direct off-spring of the melancholy Englanders with their love of nature and their fear of death. She marks the end of a movement, the movement of rhythmic prose which, fresh in the hands of Sir Thomas Browne, reached its summit in the nineteenth century, in Ruskin and De Quincey. But where her denouement, her culmination of the past, marks the foundation of her writing, she is still modern, sophisticatedly modern, intellectually modern. From the contemporary French Impressionists, she derives inspiration for the structure of her later novels; her speculations on time and space, are from the Bergsonian air she breathes. Yet though she abstracts phrases and casts and even trains of thought from the contemporaries, she never fully relinquishes her earlier influences. Supplemented by the moderns, the men of the classic past persist in molding her style.
And into this cleft between the past and present, she brings the unifying force of her feminine personality.
__________
1 “The Voyage Out” p. 121.
2 Ibid. p. 121.
3 “The Voyage Out” p. 205.
4 “The Common Reader”: “On Not Knowing Greek” p. 59.
5 “Night and Day” p. 295.
6 Ibid. p. 323.
7 “The Voyage Out” p. 101.
8 “Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts” p. 7.
9 Ibid. p. 6.
10 “Orlando” p. 106.
11 “Mrs. Dalloway” p. 29.
12 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 21.
13 “Orlando” p. 232.
14 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 57.
15 Ibid. p. 114.
16 The Waves” p. 166.
17 Ibid. p. 41.
18 “Jacob’s Room” p. 251.
19 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 114.
20 “Orlando” p. 68.
21 “To the Lighthouse” p. 160.
22 “Orlando” p. 93.
23 “Orlando” p. 93.
24 Ibid. p. 68.
25 “Urn-Burial” p. 115.
26 “Orlando” p. 84.
27 “Urn-Burial” p. 116.
28 “Orlando” p. 95.
29 Ibid. p. 177.
30 “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” p. 28.
31 “The Common Reader”: “Addison” p.139.
32 “Orlando” p. 180.
33 “Orlando” p. 113.
34 “Dream-Fugue” p. 50.
35 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 152.
36 “Orlando” p. 227.
37 “Orlando” p. 249.
38 “Ulysses” p. 150.
39 “Orlando” p. 241.
40 Ibid. p. 239.
41 Ibid. p. 240.
42 “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” p. 25.
43 Ibid. p. 25.
44 Ibid. p. 24.
THE STYLE COMPLETED AND THE THOUGHT IMPLIED
A VARIATION OF EXPERIMENTS, uninhibited by criticism and doubt, is ultimately liberated in Virginia Woolf, marking her completed style. Each of the succeeding novels represents a new nuance of innovation. Lyricism, feminine sensitivity, and a love of associations remain constant; the variable is the external structure which colors her lyricism but does not impede it. Denying masculine traditions as incompatible, she uses music as a vital medium in creating as a woman.
Music is the technical foundation for the short impressionistic life of a poetic romanticist, Jacob Flanders. As in orchestration, themes of life are played in “Jacob’s Room”, the theme of Jacob’s life, his mother’s life, the life of Clara, Sandra, Florinda, all the women he has loved. And blending them into harmony, is the great unifying theme of “Life” itself, the contemporary Georgian interest which replaced the “Nature” of the Romanticists and the medieval “God”.
With contrapuntal technique, sketches of the characters are given as they move in synchronic time. As though walking through a dance hall, Virginia Woolf notes down snatches of talk, which she uses in an experimental dialogue. New characters are introduced, revealed only through their fragmentary talk, while Clara, like the unifying theme in music, passes lightly in and out.
“ ‘Please’, said Julia Eliot, taking up her position by the curtain almost opposite the door, ‘don’t introduce me.
I like to look on. The amusing thing’, she went on, addressing Mr. Salvin, who, owing to his lameness, was accommodated with a chair, ‘the amusing thing about a party is to watch the people—coming and going, coming and going’.
‘Last time we met’, said Mr. Salvin, ‘was at the Farquhars. Poor lady! She has much to put up with’.
‘Doesn’t she look charming?’ exclaimed Miss Eliot, as Clara Durrant passed them.
‘And which of them …?’ asked Mr. Salvin, dropping his voice and speaking in quizzical tones.
‘There are so many … ’ Miss Eliot replied. Three young men stood at the doorway looking about for their hostess.
‘You don’t remember Elizabeth as I do’, said Mr. Salvin, ‘dancing Highland reels at Banchorie. Clara lacks her mother’s spirit. Clara is a little pale’.
‘What different people one sees here!’ said Miss Eliot.
‘Happily we are not governed by the evening papers’, said Mr. Salvin.
‘I never read them’, said Miss Eliot. ‘I know nothing about politics’, she added.
‘The piano is in tune’, said Clara, passing them, ‘but we may have to ask some one to move it for us’ ”1
Thus, like a music book of small completed themes, “Jacob’s Room” is built upon little paragraphs, units in themselves, reflecting the mosaic perfection Virginia Woolf beholds in life. She sees not one law, not one great unified order, but small details, exquisite morceaux, which build in their correlation a unity of a different order: a feminine unity, a feminine aspect of life. The details, the paragraphs, stand at satisfactory rest in themselves, and in tone and context are harmoniously related to each other. With the technique of a musical rondeau, ending with the first strain repeated, the mood is induced. Sounded in the opening sentence, the theme is developed and varied until it reaches its climax, strangely deeper through the associations it has accumulated. In such meditated structure, Jacob’s conflict between his love for a prostitute and his love for philosophic study, is described.
“The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes hand in hand with stupidity. There she sat staring at the fire as she had stared at the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending indecency, Jacob doubted whether he liked it in the raw. He had a violent reversion towards male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics; and was ready to turn with wrath upon whoever it was who had fashioned life thus.
“Then Florinda laid her hand upon his knee.
“After all, it was none of her fault. But the thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
“Any excuse, though serves a stupid woman. He told her his head ached.
“But when she looked at him, dumbly, half-guessing, half-understanding, apologising perhaps, anyhow saying as he had said, ‘It’s none of my fault’, straight and beautiful in body, her face like a shell within its cap, then he knew that cloisters and classics are no use whatever. The problem is insoluble.”2
Acknowledging her womanhood, Virginia Woolf is neither abstract in her philosophy of life, nor intellectual in her aesthetics. Life and style are her two main paths of interest. Like the early poetic philosophers, like Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne, she speculates, tormentedly, upon the riddle of the universe, conscious at times that questioning is useless. “At midnight … it would be foolish to vex the moor with questions—what? and why?”3
The emotional problems are inevitably expressed in surging rhythms. The phrases seem like the short lines of ballad verse, with deep caesuras. The writing is not intellectual, not philosophic, but ineffably poetic, emotionally feminine.
The delight in color and sound and smell, observed in “Orlando” and revealing Virginia Woolf’s sensuous reaction to life, is now given unrestrained freedom. She plays with the senses: “a breadth of water gleamed” she writes with intentional aural confusion. The noise and musical movement in nature she describes with rhythmic onomatopoeia:
“Up went the rooks and down again, rising in lesser numbers each time … The moss was soft; the tree-trunks spectral. Beyond them lay a silvery meadow. A breadth of water gleamed. Already the convolvulus moth was spinning over the flowers. Orange and purple, nasturtium and cherry pie, were washed into the twilight, but the tobacco plant and the passion flower, over which the great moth spun, were white as china. The rooks creaked their wings together on the tree-tops, and were settling down for sleep when, far off, a familiar sound shook and trembled—increased—fairly dinned in their ears—scared sleepy wings into the air again—the dinner bell at the house.” 4 With curious artistry, she combines the human senses in one sentence, heavily weighted with suggestion. The sensation of sight is stimulated in “orange and purple”, taste in “cherry pie”, “were washed” (sound) “into the twilight” (time), “but the tobacco plant” (smell) “over which the great moth spun” (visual motion), “were white” (a repetition of the sight stimulus) “as china” (the sensation of touch).
Typical of the self-assurance with which she has now abandoned herself to imagery, she revels in phrases like “scared sleepy wings”. She recalls Ruskin’s polemics as well as his own use of pathetic fallacies. She repeats the confusion of vague imagery, of conceits which violate reality, which Ruskin had condemned but could not resist. In a quasi-philosophic meditation, she describes religion and morals in short associative flights. Night becomes an elongated sigh, and duty, a voice piping in a thread. “The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their interpretation of the day’s meaning. Then, less melodiously, dissenters of different sects issue a cantankerous emendation … But nowadays it is the thin voice of duty, piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel, that collects the largest multitudes, and night is nothing but a long-drawn sigh between hammer-strokes, a deep breath—you can hear it from an open window even in the heart of London.”5
The old ardent justification of admired writers, marked in “The Voyage Out” appears once more, but with mature confidence. Virginia Woolf now makes merry over adulation. Marlowe becomes the symbol of the worshipped past; “detest your own age,” she burlesques Nick Greene.
“For example there is Mr. Masefield, there is Mr. Bennett. Stuff them into the flame of Marlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain. Don’t palter with the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one. … Useless to trust to the Victorians, who disembowel, or to the living, who are mere publicists.”6
In the serene, detached presentation of her early struggle, her maturity is affirmed. Conflict is no longer a destructive force in her creations. Though her impulses lie essentially in one direction, she can without “protesting or preaching” appreciate the other. The conflict between rhapsody and restraint is objectified: “I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them.” (a repetition of the Gibbon’s image and admiration in “The Voyage Out”). “I like words to be hard—such were Bonamy’s views, and they won him the hostility of those whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can’t forbear a shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature.”7
Little is exposited in “Jacob’s Room”. Action, place, time and people are suggested impressionistically. There is a feminine delicacy of associations, a word, a repetition, which sets into motion the desired thoughts and more. The whole war is suggested in one line, almost obscured by its very simplicity. “ ‘The Kaiser’, the far-away voice remarked in Whitehall, ‘received me in audience.’ ”8 And later, the war breaks out, but as a distant echo. One sees it through the half-closed eyes of a poetic woman.
“ ‘The guns?’ said Betty Flanders, half asleep, getting out of bed and going to the window, which was decorated with a fringe of dark leaves.
“Not at this distance,’ she thought. ‘I
t is the sea.’
“Again, far away, she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets. There was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons fighting for their country. But were the chickens safe? Was that some one moving downstairs? Rebecca with the toothache? No. The nocturnal women were beating great carpets. Her hens shifted slightly on their perches.”9
It is the war behind the front; the war which women heard, but kept their chickens safe and fed more sons.
Jacob’s death, sudden, unmotivated as are deaths in war, is only suggested by the desolation of his room, of his friend and his mother. It is the culmination; all of his existence is hurriedly recalled by his letters; in a description, repeated, of the room to which he had given life, his death in suggested with feminine artistry.
“ ‘He left everything just as it was,’ Bonamy marvelled. ‘Nothing arranged. All his letters strewn about for any one to read. What did he expect? Did he think he would come back?’ he mused, standing in the middle of Jacob’s room …
“Bonamy took up a bill for a hunting-crop.
‘That seems to be paid,’ he said.
“There were Sandra’s letters.
“Mrs. Durrant was taking a party to Greenwich.
“Lady Rocksbier hoped for the pleasure …
“Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though no one sits there.”10
A wistful impression, this is more the living contrast than death itself.
The poetry “denied outlet” in women, now grows less and less constrained, and in “Mrs. Dalloway” knows little suppression. The Shelleyean relentless heaving of rhythmic verbs, “I die, I faint, I tremble, I expire”; the irresistible pressing forward to a culmination, is liberated here. The singing rhythms are inseparable from Virginia Woolf’s emotional reaction to life. Her integrity asserts itself; the bald sobriety dictated by the critic is denied. Rhyme which has fallen largely out of poetry is introduced into prose, and her writing becomes more rhythmically poetic than much of contemporary verse.