Virginia Woolf

by Ruth Gruber

  “ ‘The back of my hand burns,’ said Jinny, ‘but the palm is clammy and damp with dew.’

  “ ‘Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white tide,’ said Bernard.

  “ ‘Birds are singing up and down and in and out all around us,’ said Susan.

  “ ‘The beast stamps; the elephant with its foot chained; the great brute on the beach stamps,’ said Louis.”26

  With wide eyes staring outwards, these children see little but their inner souls. Yet no children speak as they do; Virginia Woolf has not revealed the consciousness of the child but of the mystic visionary. These first images are not changed as the characters mature, but remain the touchstone of the “true self” which Orlando and Virginia Woolf have struggled to determine. The six appear in all their marked polarity as variations not only of Virginia Woolf’s observations, but with necessary modifications, of the polarity of her own character. Bernard embodies her poetic romanticism, Neville her conflicting struggle for classic formal order. In Rhoda she depicts her flight from reality to a realm of fantastic loveliness; in Louis, her longing for success to manifest, at least to the world, that she has unchained “the great beast’s foot”, freed herself from the tyranny of the waves. The fulfilled woman, Mrs. Woolf, inseparable from earth, is idealized in Susan, while Jinny reflects her sense of flowingness, the delight in partaking of the irrational rhythm of life.

  Two great divisions become apparent, two phases of human thought. On the one hand are the characters who seek a Reason behind the universe, an order divined by the intellect. On the other, are the characters, intuitive and more poetic, who conceive life as an incessant rise and fall of waves. For them there is no higher meaning, no absolute Reason within and beyond their own existence. It is in such a philosophy of irrational continuity that Virginia Woolf, as poet and woman, believes. Yet in her endless struggle for the meaning of life, traces of a search for some cause, some higher force, create in her a philosophic conflict, analogous to the conflict into which she divides her characters.

  Life is poetically symbolized in the waves; the characters distinguished as they accept the apparently meaningless rhythm or seek imposed order. All of them search for happiness, each through his own vision, his own reaction to the waves. It is Susan who seeks the “natural happiness” implicit in merging herself within the endless organism of nature. “ ‘I shall never have anything but natural happiness. It will almost content me. I shall go to bed tired. I shall lie like a field bearing crops in rotation; in the summer heat will dance over me; in the winter I shall be cracked with the cold. But heat and cold will follow each other naturally without my willing or unwilling. My children will carry me on; their teething, their crying, their going to school and coming back will be like the waves of the sea under me’ ”.27 The eternal movement holds for Susan the meaning of life. She has no desire to impose her will upon the waves; she is too sensible of the futility in defying the stupendous rhythm. Hers is a cosmic order in which her own sharp identity is lost. It is Louis, supersensitive, who seeks a volitional order, a personal superiority, to compensate for his “neatness”, his “Australian accent”, aggravated idiosyncrasies barring him from the “protective waves of the ordinary.”28 Being antisocial, he revolts against the amorphous rhythm: “ ‘I will reduce you to order’ ”29 is his cry against the irrelevant details in the mosaic of life. It is his flaunt against the “hats bobbing up and down”, the opening and shutting of the door, “the hesitations at counters; and the words that trail drearily without meaning; I will reduce you to order’ ”.30

  Inseparable from this problem of identity against the waves, is the problem of time, a constant throughout her novels. The one moment consummate of all time, is sought for, despaired of, and even if ultimately experienced, returns, with the inexorable law of the waves, back into the dark massive flowingness of time. In the conflict between the one identified moment of light and the dark progress of eternity, lies the Bergson-Orlando discord between “time in the mind and time in the clock.” Neville, “who had been thinking with the unlimited time of the mind, which stretches in a flash from Shakespeare to ourselves, poked the fire and began to live by that other clock which marks the approach of a particular person. From the myriads of mankind and all time past he had chosen one person, one moment in particular.”31

  Against the confusion of eternity, he erects one unity. In the arbitrary order he imposes upon time, the conflict of chaos and shape, the great conflict of “The Waves” is thus reflected. Neville, like Louis and like Lily of “To the Lighthouse”, seeks to objectify the chaos, to pierce it with light. But upon him, as upon all the characters, hangs the shadow of primal darkness, ridiculing their activity, almost negating their lives.

  “ ‘Our separate drops are dissolved; we are extinct, lost in the abysses of time, in the darkness’ ”.32 The quests for identity, for classic order, for light, for the supreme moment, are rendered futile in a pause of silence, an effigy of the long nothingness.

  “ ‘As silence falls,’ ” Bernard says, “ ‘I am dissolved utterly and become featureless and scarcely to be distinguished from another. It does not matter. What

  matters?’ ”33 Embedded in English futilitarianism, the characters for a time lose their driving will for power, upon which Freud has laid man’s struggle for happiness. Viewing their lives against the setting of eternity, they become apathetic to the urge for fame. Kings and paupers fall alike into the great oblivion of time: “how strange it seems to set against the whirling abysses of infinite space a little figure with a golden tea-pot on his head. Soon one recovers belief in figures: but not at once in what they put on their heads. Our English past—one inch of light. Then people put teapots on their heads and say, ‘I am a King!’ No I try to recover, as we walk, the sense of time, but with that streaming darkness in my eyes I have lost my .grip … What do we oppose, with this random flicker of light in us that we call brain and feeling, how can we do battle against this flood; what has permanence? Our lives too stream away, down the unlighted avenues, past the strip of time, unidentified.”34

  Power, majesty, identity are all illusions, all futile, at this stage of middling life. The waves are impervious. Characteristic of her womanhood, Virginia Woolf surrenders herself more and more to their amorphous rhythm, to the periodicity of sleeping and waking, of living and dying. The desire to impose order is “a mistake … a convenience, a lie. There is always deeply below it … a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights.”35

  She negates for a time all the characters who seek to subjugate the waves into an order in which they alone are supreme. Neville’s cry, “ ‘Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos … this formless imbecility’ ”36 is immediately softened. The beauty in endless nature, in this very chaos, makes man seem ugly, insignificant with petty lusts. The struggle for the reins with which to govern life, directing it with kingly power, is subdued. She longs no longer to order the waves but to be ordered within them.

  Meaningless, aimless, it is this dull acquiescence to the rhythm of life which makes men futilitarians. Apparently, all is vain; only a “memento mori”, the medieval refuge remains. In the final judgment of all their lives, Bernard, aged, a failure to himself, reflects “ ‘How we surrender, how we submit to the stupidity of nature’ ”.37 The youthful struggle for identity has crumbled. He is certain of what in childhood had been mooted: “satiety and doom”—death. “ ‘I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion, Now there is nothing. No fin to break the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me’ ”.38

  “ ‘How then does light return to the earth after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly … There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun.”39 So Bernard ends not in disillusion; light returns to him in the need to struggle, in the exertion of power, in the search for identity and freedom. In opposition alone can he find happiness. Not in solving the conflict but in
the very struggle, life fulfills its meaning. “ ‘Fight! Fight!’ … It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together—this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing pursuit’ ”.40

  The philosophy of futilitarianism has been defeated once more by activity. The body’s urge for action has rejuvenated the spirit of youth. It has saved the poet from nihilism and spiritual apathy. “The Waves”, a Vulgate of existence, ends not in death, but in dawn. The struggle against death is reanimated, the rhythm of night and day, of life and death is retrieved.

  “There is a sense of the break of day … . Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.

  “And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’ ”

  “The waves broke on the shore.”41

  To the last note, the conflict is sounded. Man must struggle for freedom, struggle against death. And yet, inexorably, the waves rise and fall; death is the one law of life.

  It is the constancy of antitheses, the rhythm of conflicts, which determines Virginia Woolf’s philosophy as well as her style. It is the two weights upon the balance which she sees struggling for supremacy. Hers is the philosophy of the earliest primitives a philosophy to which all others revert; out of darkness came light, out of death, life. She sees all things, like a Noah’s ark, in pairs of like and unlike, of classicist and romanticist, of man and woman, of night and day. There is no synthetic solution to their opposition; health lies in being a man or a woman, not a compromise between them.

  __________

  1 2 3 “The Waves” p. 216.

  4 “The Voyage Out” p. 45.

  5 “The Waves” p. 262.

  6 Ibid. p. 264.

  7 Ibid. p. 283.

  8 Ibid. p. 283.

  9 “The Waves” p. 40.

  10 Ibid. p. 176.

  11 “The Waves” p. 87.

  12 Ibid. p. 94.

  13 Ibid. p. 196.

  14 Ibid. p. 170.

  15 Ibid. p. 200.

  16 Ibid. p. 237.

  17 “The Waves” p. 238.

  18 Ibid. p. 88.

  19 Ibid. p. 90.

  20 “The Waves” p. 40.

  21 Ibid. p. 110.

  22 Ibid. p. 272.

  23 Ibid. p. 176.

  24 Ibid. p. 5.

  25 “The Voyage Out” p. 262.

  26 “The Waves” p. 7.

  27 “The Waves” p. 142.

  28 Ibid. p. 101.

  29 Ibid. p. 102.

  30 Ibid. p. 102.

  31 “The Waves” p. 299.

  32 Ibid. p. 246.

  33 Ibid. p. 245.

  34 “The Waves” p. 248.

  35 Ibid. p. 279.

  36 Ibid. p. 246.

  37 Ibid. p. 294.

  38 Ibid. p. 311.

  39 Ibid. p. 313.

  40 Ibid. p. 295.

  41 “The Waves” p. 324.

  THE WILL TO CREATE AS A WOMAN

  INFLUENCED BY MEN IN the beginning of her career, Virginia Woolf evolves, with irresistible force, the woman within her. A womanly love of details subverts the more rigid sense of form; her novels have a feminine expansiveness, an apparent irrelevancy which is truer to life than to art. She has little of the logic and restraint called manly; her sensibilities, her emotions, her philosophy of life are normally feminine. Freed from the shame of her sex, a shame which drove other women to hide behind male pseudonyms, she explores her femininity and within it, creates her style.

  She accepts the tradition that women cannot think abstractly, that their scope is smaller than man’s. It is this very limitation which she consecrates, availing herself of the smaller scope, of the petty and the concrete. Seeking always the meaning of life, its great profundities, she has discovered that a mention of their names alone, of immortality or God or death, is no persuasion of their truth, no crucible of the profundity of her work. In life itself, the recurring wonder of finding these deepest realities reflected even in trivialities, impresses her; she converts her observation into art. She particularizes truth; the meaning of life she detects in “waves of hands, hesitations at street corners”, in “a nightingale, who sings among the trampling feet.”1 Peculiarly feminine, she finds more vividness and perhaps more truth in these small symbolic details. Philosophic Latinities, pale and abstract, are often so suggestive, she feels, that they lose distinction and suggest nothing. All must be concrete, and if not personal, at least specific. “ ‘I have little aptitude for reflection,’ ” says Bernard, “ ‘ I require the concrete in everything. It is only so that I lay hands upon the world’ ”.2

  It is as though a new realm had been opened in literature, the world of women, correlated to the other longer established one of men, and yet remaining peculiarly distinct. Both seek the same finalities of love, reality and death, but it is as if two unique towers had been erected and the men peered through one telescope and the women through another. Fundamental differences, ultimately acknowledged by man and woman, now can he developed. The problem of describing the world she sees, uninhibited by convention, is one of the first difficulties Virginia Woolf confronts. From the start, her ideal is to create as a woman: in her earliest novel she pronounces Jane Austen “incomparably the greatest female writer we possess … and for this reason: she does not attempt to write like a man. Every other woman does.”3 With increasing consciousness, this ideal progresses through her works, unmitigated by critical opinion, becoming less a spoken theory than the general insinuation.

  The little things in life, the scarves and windows, she describes with feminine integrity; they are the things which touch women, an element of beauty in their lives. The sensory experience derived from clothes and ornamentation, may be described with the same emotional rhythm and imagery as experiences long conventionalized. An analysis of woman’s sensations in a modern department store, of the awakening perceptions of desire, of envy, of hunger, or of aesthetic satisfaction, may penetrate her consciousness as poignantly as would an analysis of her love-life. These reactions demand no revolutionary experiments in expression. Yet an obsolete style, filled with allegory or conceits, would seem little better than a comedy of anachronisms, an extravaganza in style.

  In her most signal essay, “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf lays down a platform in which the woman novelist can find truest expression. You must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemist’s bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudo-marble.”4

  Sensory apperceptions are as vital, evoked by an apothecary, as those evoked by nature. The irresistible attraction of a shopping-center is a value rarely denied, though often ridiculed or overlooked by masculine writers. Mrs. Dalloway’s reaction to the London shopping district is denotative of her whole romantic feminine nature: “Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; … a fe
w pearls; salmon on an ice-block.”5 In her “passion for gloves” lies a penetrating characteristic of her fastidious personality: “Her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves.”6

  The urge for selectivity, for choosing the proper objects as material, has been one of the moot problems of all literature. Not only form changes from age to age, but the interests change too. And just as the selection from the vast soil of human potentialities, depends upon the personality of the writer, so it depends also upon his sex. Integrity is imminent; a writer is of necessity discounted if he yields weakly to dictated standards. Yet women have been expected to submit unquestioningly to the standards imposed by men, to use a form which man has evolved to suit himself, and objects which have meaning for him. “But it is obvious,” Virginia Woolf writes, “that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.”7

  The expression of feminine values, characterizes for Virginia Woolf the integrity of the woman novelist. Subjectively conscious of the power which trifling femininities may have upon the emotions, she describes the texture of a dress, its color and its style, as carefully as Wells might describe a Utopian invention. More poetically than he, she infuses her details with feminine denotations. The dress becomes the symbol of the characters, marking their desires and personality. “‘This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity,’ ”8 says Rhoda, in revolting unhappily against the masses. Jinny’s reaction to clothes, directly following, stamps her contrasting nature. Without conflict or rebellion, she finds in clothes the very expression of herself, the means with which she makes her debut into life. In the waving of a scarf, the fluttering of a dress, she discovers her meaning in life. Attracting men, part of the lawful rhythm of the waves, she finds in these preliminaries to human intercourse, the essence of love, the quintessence of life. Through her dress, she reflects herself: “ ‘for winter I should like a thin dress shot with red threads that would gleam in the firelight. Then when the lamps were lit, I should put on my red dress and it would be thin as a veil, and would wind about my body, and billow out as I came into the room, pirouetting. It would make a flower shape as I sank down, in the middle of the room, on a gilt chair’ ”.9 Just as her clothes typify Jinny’s personality, so in “Jacob’s Room”, the dress becomes epithetic, and Sandra is repeatedly characterized, with Homeric inconography, as “veiled in white”10 symbolic of her Grecian beauty. Her dress, her lipstick, her handkerchief, the weapons which woman employs for conquering or defending herself are, though immeasurably different from man’s, no less effective. A powder-puff may be as deadly as a sword, “obliterating in its passage all the most fervent feelings of the human heart.”11