by Ruth Gruber
The beauty of a well served dinner, Virginia Woolf finds can be as profound as the beauty of a sunset. The composition of a bowl of fruit, the possibilities of which had been recognized as a rich subject for painting, may obtain as well for literary description. The long tradition of household cares has made her sensitive to apparently insignificant objects. As much emotion may be aroused through the position of a fork beside a napkin, as much nervousness or satisfaction, as through the position of a tree against the sky. Design is everywhere, even the patterns of food may be symbolic of the accidents of life. “ ‘How strange,’ said Susan, ‘the little heaps of sugar look by the side of our plates. Also the mottled peelings of pears, and the plush rims to the looking-glasses. I had not seen them before. Everything is now set; everything is fixed. Bernard is engaded’ ”.12 ‘The order experienced in life as prearranged, imposes itself conceptually upon a woman’s arrangement of the table. There is an awakening to the human dispensation of trifling objects, reflecting the superhuman structure of the universe.
The contemporary interest in formalism, seen as the relationship of shapes, often selects, the unimportant or the extraordinary for material and gives them new values. Seeking a flexibility between style and thought, tradition and experiment, Virginia Woolf combines her old rhetorical standards with which she had sung of nature, with this new structural formalism explicit of her interest in still-life.
Food, its colors, its form, interests her as it interests a Cezanne, for the sensuous satisfaction it obtains. In the general impulse to see complexity and loveliness in attributes before unnoticed, she describes the formal beauty in the juxtaposition of fruit, variously shaped. “Her eyes had been going in and out among the curves and shadows of the fruit, among the rich purples of the low-land grapes, then over the horny ridge of the shell, putting a yellow against a purple, a curved shape against a round shape, without knowing why she did it, or why, every time she did it, she felt more and more serene.”13 An aesthetic gratification induced by still-life diffuses her with the calmness which poets had been used to seek in the woods at the side of a lake.
Formal satisfaction, indigenous to this age, she supplements with the romantic associations typical of her style: “the arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold … ”14
Combining the culinary heritage of her sex with a romantic contemporary delight in minutiae, Virginia Woolf experiences in food not only the possibilities of aesthetic satisfaction but a deep physical pleasure. Novelist and woman, she is concerned with food as it is a primal necessity; hunger is a biologic urge of which she is not ashamed. “It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine.”15 Her own characters dine luxuriously; no attic poverty entices her. With a mixture of feminine sensitivity to food and a poetic urge for conceits, she describes a meal in diction suggestive of the Cavalier poets. A dish of soles, spread with “a counterpane of the whitest cream”, is branded “like the spots on the flanks of a doe”. Sprouts are “foliated as rosebuds but more succulent”, and a pudding, “wreathed in napkins” rises “all sugar from the waves.”16
Just as the male novelists had often used environments which were peculiarly masculine, as battle-fields and halls for parliament, so Virginia Woolf seeks that setting which is peculiarly feminine—the room. “For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force.”17 The room is a fixated image throughout her works; in “A Room of One’s Own” it is the refuge for the feminine artist; the seclusion from the critic with freedom to write and think. Her women, oppressed by society, flee to their rooms as poets flee back to nature, there to find themselves. “ ‘I went back to my room by myself and I did— what I liked’ ”,18 says Katherine of “Night and Day”. It is in her room in solitude that she becomes “a creature of uncalculating passion and instinctive freedom.”19 The room, like a civilized substitute for nature, is not only the harbor for desperate flights, but is as “Jacob’s Room” or Mrs. Dalloway’s ballroom, the background for life, the stage molded by and itself molding the characters. Both men and women are seen against this setting. The room or its smaller counterpart, the railway carriage, become the sources for the material of life.
In the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, “Life” in the form of the old woman Mrs. Brown, is analyzed against the background of a train compartment. It is Virginia Woolf’s great complaint against the Edwardians, against Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy, that they do not see the life in the room, that they evade Mrs. Brown and look out of the window. “ ‘I fill my mind,’ ” she says through Bernard, “ ‘with whatever happens to be the contents of a room or a railway carriage as one fills a fountain pen in an inkpot’ ”.20 Her sensitivity to the room is as vitally feminine as is her sensitivity to food and clothes. Its expression is a trenchant mark of her will to create as a woman. The rooms she observes are as varied as continental landscapes; but more subjective than nature, they are created and determined by the women who inhabit them. “The rooms differ so completely; they are calm or thunderous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a prison yard; are hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers—one has only to go into any room in any street for the whole of that extremely complex force of femininity to fly in one’s face”21
Her aspect of life, the background against which she conceives her men as well as her women, projects itself into the room and the window. In the room conflicts are fought and overcome; passions or indifferences are stimulated by the walls and the atmospheric setting, just as lights and tones are brought out in a portrait by its background. At the window the room is negated; one flees, perhaps from the sofa with its associations of sex, and in looking out at the stars, grows almost sexless. The window is for the poetic man or woman; it is the harbor for dreams. In the window and the room is seen the conflict of the individual against society, of the people who flee from reality and those who determine to stay, to find themselves in life. Woman as well as man is communal in the room, in the sitting or the dining room. She is seen and sees herself as a relationship. At the window she is abstracted from the whole. The window replaces the romanticist’s mountain top, from which the characters, restless, unhappy, lonely, characters like Katherine and Louis, look down into the street, as the romanticists look down into the valley. They note the sounds, the passers-by. Detached from the rhythm of the room, they respond tremblingly to the symphonic rhythm of the unknown world.
The characters of Virginia Woolf’s novels might be divided into those who fit into the room, who have found themselves in life, and those who stand at windows, the dreamers, the anchorites. In the room belong the great women, perfected mentally and bodily, women like Mrs. Ambrose of “The Voyage Out”. It is a room conceived like the last gallery in the Louvre with its tall flawless statue in the center and around it the marble floor and velvet stools for worshippers. At the window belongs Rachel, dreaming of music, discontent with mankind, in love. The politicians, the successful novelists, and most of the scholars would fit into the room; at the window, the lovers, the spinsters and the poets who have not yet arrived.
Through a deep psychological analysis of her reactions to the room and to its people, Virginia Woolf thus attempts to make her novels irrefutably feminine, the creation of a woman. Not to flaunt her sex, not to justify or e
vade it artificially; her ideal is to “write as a woman but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.22 She demands no sterility, no social aberrations for the novelist; only a normal sexuality, giving blood and freshness to her creation.
She attempts to infuse this “curious sexual quality” in her writings, and in describing comparatively normal people, succeeds. “Jacob’s Room” with its stippled sketches of love between mother and son, between artist and model, between husband and wife, between the wife and a lover, is filled with this feminine sexual quality. Sex permeates the book but always with feminine delicacy, verging upon Victorian innuendos. In her language itself and in her descriptions, there is no trace of obscenity; sex is described in veiled insinuations. But there is one scene slipping from the rest, where suggestiveness goes too far and becomes sentimental, ill-concealed pornography. The bedroom noises are described through the reactions of the sitting room, endowed with life. There is no censurable word uttered, only phrases, apparently innocuous, like “the door was shut”; “wood, when it creaks”; “these old houses … soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt”; muffled with a sentimental personification of a letter as a mother’s heart; “if the pale blue envelope lying by the biscuit-box had the feelings of a mother, the heart was torn by the little creak, the sudden stir”; with the climax, no longer concealed by poetic euphuisms: “behind the door was the obscene thing, the alarming presence.”23 She is shocked by it, “the obscene thing”, she holds it off from her on prongs, shuddering even to name it. Her mind is blocked; she has lost her objectivity, that “incandescence” which she preaches so fervently for others. She falls in her attempt to write without shocking, in Victorian discreetness.
This scene in “Jacob’s Room” is a fine instance of the pitfalls in her sex analysis. But she is too deeply rooted in the modern Freudian atmosphere to evade sex. As a woman, moreover, recognizing in sex a primal force in life, she is sensitive to its value in literature. In “A Room of One’s Own” she preaches a Utopia where the woman novelist will take her notebook into the bordels, unhindered by social criticism or her own self-consciousness. “She will not need to limit herself any longer to the respectable houses of the upper middle classes. She will go without kindness or condescension, but in the spirit of fellowship, into those small, scented rooms where sit the courtesan, the harlot and the lady with the pug dog. There they still sit in the rough and ready-made clothes that the male writer has had perforce to clap upon their shoulders. But Mary Carmichael” (dummying for the modern woman novelist) “will have out her scissors and fit them close to every hollow and angle. It will be a curious sight, when it comes, to see these women as they are, but we must wait a little, for Mary Carmichael will still be encumbered with that self-consciousness in the presence of ‘sin’ which is the legacy of our sexual barbarity. She will still wear the shoddy old fetters of class on her feet.”24 Psychologically, it is this very “self-consciousness in the presence of ‘sin’ ” which makes Virginia Woolf speak so guardedly of Jacob’s bedroom; it is this self-consciousness which causes her to cry out in “Orlando”: “Let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.”25
Yet it is on the note of sex that “Orlando” opens: “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—.”26 The duality of Orlando’s sex embodies a doctrine congenial to Virginia Woolf. It is the theory that the great poet is a composite of man and woman, possessing the characteristic endowments of both. Such a belief would account then for the poet’s intuitive understanding of both sexes; it would explain how Shakespeare could have created his women, or Jane Austen, despite her spinsterhood, create men like Mr. Bennett. It would rationalize moreover and raise at least to a plane of understanding, the recurrence of homosexuality among poets, proving that one sex had gained supremacy: in Sappho, the man, and in Shelley and Proust, the woman. But in the greatest poets, in Shakespeare and Goethe, and attempted in Orlando, both sexes have approximately equal weight. While in nature, the coexistence of these two sexes rarely takes physical form, Orlando, unhindered by natural constraint, undergoes the actual bodily changes which differentiate the sexes. Like the early magicians, he can embody his idea, acquiring the physical peculiarities of a woman when his feminine perceptions become dominant.
This theory of homosexuality among poets is not original with Virginia Woolf, though her interpretation of it is. It can be traced back, in concept, like most contemporary doctrines of abnormality, to the Greeks. In Plato’s “Banquet”, the Androgyns are described as a composite man-woman, whom the gods later parted. Sir Thomas Browne, whom Virginia Woolf has studied with care, writes in his “Pseudoxia Epidemica”: “We must acknowledge this Androgynall condition in man”27 while Shakespeare suggests it in the prison scene in “King Richard II”:
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul:
My soul the father.28
Undoubtedly the most direct influence upon “Orlando” is from Coleridge, whose famous declaration: “The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous”, Virginia Woolf quotes in “A Room of One’s Own”.29 In his “Aids to Reflection”, he accounts for the existence of good and evil in man as the co-existence of a stronger and inferior, i. e. masculine and feminine nature. The stronger male reserve embodies the will and the reason; the inferior, the unreasoning, carnal, easily tempted Eve. As a woman, Orlando has certainly this “inferior” nature; she is sensual and fallible, and her logic is more intuitive than dialectic. But as a man, Orlando’s will is rather dubious, and though he philosophizes constantly, his inductions are too haphazard and subjective to be called “masculine” pellucid reason. Obviously the effeminate pole of his nature, the part most analogous to Virginia Woolf, is dominant. In “A Room of One’s Own”, she seeks “amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilised and uses all its faculties.”30
Coleridge supports this theory by the “very old tradition of the homo androgynous, that is, that the original man, the individual first created was bisexual”,31 a belief limited not to Greece or Egypt or Jerusalem, but found even in Persian and Indian antiquity. Orlando, explained as a conscious outgrowth of this tradition, becomes less esoteric. His change of sex appears then as a philosophic possibility, conceived in remote antiquity, rather than as the extravagance of a modern ingenious woman. Through a progression in time, he is able to embody both sexes separately. Virginia Woolf disjoins the male and female within him just as the Greek gods had disjoined the Androgyns.
There is almost no perversion in Orlando’s bi-sexuality. As a man, he has a strong predilection towards women, makes violent love to princesses and lies with “loose women among treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships.”32 His virility is certified. As a woman, she is no less attracted by men. She adopts instinctively the necessary preliminaries to love. Coquetry, modesty, and an interest in clothes become as natural as cutting off a head or committing any of the barbarisms which give the stamp to manhood. Her bearing a child proves that she is normal, if one accepts Freud’s theory that perverts have renounced all claim to reproduction: „auf jede Beteiligung an der Fortpflanzung verzichtet”.33
Orlando then remains physically true to sex, whichever it be. Turning woman, “she remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented and exquisitely apparalled.
“ ‘Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires,’ she reflected.”34 But when the Captain of the “Enamoured Lady” offers her a slice of corned beef, she is filled with the same “indescribable pleasure” which as a man she had experienced with the Russian princess. But “then she had pursued, now she fled. Which is the greater ecstasy? The man’s or the woman’s? And are they not perhaps the same? No, she thought, this is the most delicious (thanking the Captain but refusing), to refuse, and see him frown … to resist and to yield, to yield and to resist. Surely it throws the spirit into such a rapture as nothing else can.”35