Virginia Woolf: A Portrait
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Haunted by the Spanish Civil War, by the fatal roles of already triumphant Fascism and Nazism, she addresses the male population of 1938:
[The dictator] is interfering now with your liberty; he is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions not merely between the sexes but between the races. You are feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they were shut out, when they were shut up, because they were women. Now you are being shut out, you are being shut up, because you are Jews, because you are democrats, because of race, because of religion.
Throughout the work, which will cause a scandal, she compares the segregation and oppression of women to Nazi anti-Semitism. Let us note that she rejects the “feminist” label and emphasizes that, with regard to men and women, a “common interest unites us; it is one world, one life.”112
Nevertheless, compared with Leonard, who agrees, she considers herself an “amateur”: “But I am not a politician: obviously, can only rethink politics very slowly into my own tongue.”113 In doing so, politics, “rethought,” and “slowly,” becomes political, attuned to the intelligence of history.
Her unexamined anti-Semitic attitude, in contrast to this text, is all the more paradoxical in that her literary practice, her very act of writing, is grounded in her refusal to accept necessarily reductive, received definitions. She takes nothing for granted, nothing as fait accompli. She requires each thing to be fresh each time it appears. Here is the voice of Virginia rebelling against all fixity, all ossification: “In a world which contains the present moment, [said Neville] why discriminate? Nothing should be named lest by doing so we change it. Let it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I.”114
And then that parasitic voice that, in everyday life (the life to which Leonard and their marriage belong), hardens into hackneyed racist clichés, inherited from her ancestors, never analyzed or questioned, never the object of reflection. Never “rethought.” Accepted as is.
Of that voice, of that anti-Semitic fetishism, here are two examples drawn from among so many others. In 1905, while on a cruise to Portugal with her brother, Adrian, Virginia Stephen complained about finding “a great many Portuguese Jews on board, and other repulsive objects, but we keep clear of them.”115
In 1933, the year Hitler took power (which she immediately deplored), Virginia Woolf wrote to Quentin Bell of having nothing to wear to her friends the Hutchinsons’, who were holding an engagement party for their daughter and Victor de Rothschild, “the richest Jew in Europe,” but she refused to go out shopping for “gloves, hat, and shoes, all for a Jew.” A few hours later, when Vanessa returned from the reception, Virginia announced to Quentin how much his mother “didn’t like the flavour of the Jew. Like raw pork, she said. Surely rather an unkind saying?”116
Hard to imagine Virginia’s deep contradictions, her incessant inner resistance, the unconscious, instinctive, surreptitious efforts that summoned her to disguise the reflex reactions, probably even physical, that the constant proximity of a Jew must have caused in her, along with the official tie to a representative of the race she abhorred, even (perhaps especially) if he was closer to her than anyone else in the world, except Vanessa.
Hard to imagine as well the social humiliation that haunted her and that she hoped to overcome by pre-empting it, by going on the offensive to defend herself, by casually announcing her husband’s Jewishness in the same breath as her anti-Semitism which, in her circle, went without saying—which canceled out the significance of having married a Woolf. For Leonard, even Virginia’s anti-Semitism was a trump card, validating and guaranteeing his admission into the only group he recognized as his own.
But it is shame, yes, silent shame that torments Virginia, eats at her, usually without her knowing it. Despite Leonard’s quiet, growing prestige, she suspects the reactions of those closest to them, like Maynard Keynes, an intimate friend, who mentions “Virginia and the Jew,” and congratulates himself for visiting one day and finding Virginia home, “but no Jew.” All this did not mean hostility toward Woolf. He was greatly and increasingly respected in this circle where everyone was bound to the others. Linked to them beyond all amorous rivalries, all justified reproaches, no member missed an opportunity to criticize the others then unaware of it, behind each other’s backs. But Leonard Woolf’s case was different.117
A difference Virginia dreaded facing, before which she shrinks. To the French painter Jacques Raverat, long absent, now in France, incurably ill (and whom she floods with letters in which she exposes her whole soul, breathing with vitality, keeping him alert, persuading him of the significance his life has for her), she answers, when he is surprised at learning nothing of Leonard: “What is my husband like? A Jew: very long nosed and thin, immensely energetic; But why don’t I talk about him is that really you are Anti-Semitic, or used to be, when I was in the sensitive stage of engagement; so that it was then impressed upon me not to mention him.” And joking in a letter a year earlier: “I make him pay for his unfortunate mistake in being born a Jew by discharging the whole business of life.”118
Yes, hard to imagine the violence she had to inflict upon herself and her distress at unconsciously having to maintain this contradiction between the constant, indispensable presence of a companion so dear to her, and the innate, congenital rejection of what, in her own eyes, must forever define him, even if she attributes to him the role of the exceptional Jew. Here we are in the perversion of a perversion.
A poison, and it especially affects Virginia. Leonard knows how to defend himself on this point; his pain has consumed his ability to suffer: he perfects his indifference to the ambient anti-Semitism, which he has trained himself not to notice. Thus, within his circle, he never falters in his role as a most eminent member, embraced by them thanks to his tacit, abiding consent to let them wound him again and again.
A secret wound locked away in a part of him no longer accessible, forbidden even to himself, as he retreats ever further into his increasingly rigid shell. But for all of that, never sacrificing his earnest charm, his laughter, his affability, both warm and distant; his energy, his obstinacy, his legendary pigheadedness; his alternately severe, austere, or childish air; his growing infatuation with animals; his prodigious persuasive and decision-making abilities; his natural osmosis with his circle and his ability to withdraw. His passion for gardening, which might also have been a symbolic means to root himself in the English soil. His often hysterical fits of anger, the last traces of the former, tormented Leonard, who, repressed, explodes. His reputation for wisdom, dignity, vigor. And never sacrificing his obsession to “care for” and protect his wife, who so protected him and who was, who remained, his lifeline. He must thus become hers—and above all, he must make it common knowledge.
He would not create work comparable to Virginia’s, but would remain convinced that he safeguarded her power to write. And that may be true. In any case, it’s clear that he did not impede the work, as often happens in marriage. And a different fate might not have produced equivalent work. And Virginia’s life might not have included such rich moments.
On the other hand, neither would it have been marred by what she considered a nightmare: the existence of her in-laws, whom she could not bear for being Jewish and even less for their social status, which Virginia mistook to be much lower than it actually was.
Sydney Woolf died at the height of his career. Suddenly without resources, his widow had to move with her nine children from their elegant Kensington address to Putney, a much disparaged neighborhood.
Virginia’s first visit there following her engagement, as she describes it to her beloved Greek teacher, Janet Case:
“A sandwich, Miss Stephen—or may I call you Virginia?” “What? Ham sandwiches for tea?” “Not Ham: potted meat. We don’t eat Ham or bacon or Shellfish in this house.” “Not Shellfish? Why not shellfish?” “Because it says in the Scriptures that they are unclean creatures, and our Mr Josephs at the Synagogue—and—and …” It was queer.
How often she would describe to her friends and her sister Marie Woolf’s birthdays: “10 Jews sat round me … imagine eating birthday cake with silent Jews at 11 pm.” To Ottoline Morrell, the refined hostess of those grand receptions Virginia adored and Leonard avoided: “I do nothing but read Borrow, when I’m not dining with 22 Jews to celebrate my mother in laws 84th birthday.” The latter exasperates her for considering her children, “these dull plain serviceable Jews & Jewesses … all splendid men & women.” And when they are invited to Rodmell, she sizes them up: “dressed, like all Jews, as if for high tea in a hotel lounge, never mixing with the country, talking nasally, talking incessantly, but requiring at intervals the assurance that I think it really jolly to have them. ‘I am so terribly sensitive Virginia’ my mother in law says pensively, refusing honey, but sending me into the kitchen to find strawberry jam.” Often Virginia’s anti-Semitism merged with a classic aversion to mother-in-laws.120
She sometimes felt a fondness for this woman who was always anxious to see her, worried she hadn’t come if Leonard entered first. Their visits with Marie were apparently affectionate and courteous. She admired Virginia and, on her deathbed after a fall, told Virginia that she should call her next novel Fallen Woman. Nevertheless, Virginia refrained from developing tender feelings for her, and when she found herself feeling daughterly affection one day, immediately the image of a terrifying mother, ready to seize her in her clutches, arose.
That reaction of horror and terror had nothing to do with Marie’s Jewishness or Virginia’s snobbishness, but with a fantasy of fatal proximity, of threatening, inescapable intimacy, that made Mrs. Woolf the universal maternal symbol that threatens every daughter, in this case, Virginia, even if their connection was only through Leonard: “To be attached to her as a daughter would be so cruel a fate that I can think of nothing worse; & thousands of women might be dying of it in England today: this tyranny of mother over daughter, or father, their right to the due being as powerful as anything in the world. And then, they ask, why women dont write poetry. Short of killing Mrs W nothing could be done!” And again: “How many daughters have been murdered by women like this! What a net of falsity they spread over life. How it rots beneath their sweetness—goes brown and soft like a bad pear!”121
Here we recognize the “Angel in the House” from A Room of One’s Own, which each woman must kill within herself in order to be free. What a strange confusion! Marie Woolf displaces Julia Stephen, Virginia’s mother, dead so early on, so sublimated, so equivocal, whom Virginia is “to want and want and not to have.” And whose power over her daughters and their father, irresistible when she was alive, remains inextinguishable and more tyrannical after her death. What does Virginia want to kill? The death of her mother, surely; the death of the untrustworthy dead, a pervasive ghost. For whom Mrs. Woolf, alive, must pay.122
Poor Marie Woolf, whose great power is reduced to reminding her son of her right to gratitude for never going to bed, as a young widow, without a basket of socks to darn for company; to punctual visits from her children; to celebrations of her famous birthdays—daunting, it is true, if we are to believe an overwhelmed Virginia, who describes plans to celebrate: “And on Wednesday the Jews assemble and poor 80 chocolats in the form of sovereigns into the lap of the Mother Woolf who is 80; and there will be a cheque among them for that sum.”123 All to be followed by parlor games.
But here is “Mother Woolf,” whose status of “Jewish mother” changes to symbolic universal mother, the bane of tyrannized daughters; here is Virginia, spellbound, who briefly, passionately, takes her for a maternal symbol. Virginia who is then stricken, disconcerted, and who resists, as when Marie confides to her an unconfessed secret of her adolescence.
A furtive intimacy, which the daughter-in-law dreads, sometimes brings the two women closer over the years. Inhibitions are immediately awakened in Virginia, a wild terror, emotions Marie Woolf is not the true object of, even though she may have revived them by her emotional power and her easy acceptance of the role of mother. Virginia would be moved when Mrs. Woolf confessed to her that, of all her daughters-in-law, Virginia was her favorite.
And Virginia thanks her nephew Julian Bell, Vanessa’s oldest son, who paid a visit to Bella, one of Marie Woolf’s “unfortunate” daughters: “my mother in law was delighted that according to you I am very fond of her. That was a master stroke—I am, in a way; but how did you know it?”124
The old woman’s grief over the death of her daughter Clara would, for once, get the better of Virginia:
Leonard’s sister you see … died, poor woman; literally was killed by her husband; and I went up to see my mother in law; and really it would have drawn tears from a stone—poor old woman, aged 84, she’d sat up 2 nights with the dying and the husband [George Walker], a cheap American ruffian, with whom she’d quarreled violently; there they sat side by side and the daughter died between them; and my mother in law said, “She asked so little of life”—an extraordinarily good epitaph: “And why am I left alive?”—and then there was the funeral and all the Jews came to Tavistock Square and sat round like prophets in their black clothes and top hats denouncing unrighteousness.125
Marcel Proust comes to mind again, and Swann, who “belonged to that stout Jewish race, in whose vital energy, its resistance to death, its individual members seem to share.” The narrator goes on to describe the moment of death when “One can see only a prophet’s beard surmounted by a huge nose which dilates to inhale its last breath, before the hour strikes for the ritual prayer and the punctual procession of distant relatives begins, advancing with mechanical movements as upon an Assyrian frieze.”126
But, again, how can Virginia’s horror for even the word, “Jew,” accommodate the flesh and bone, the very substance, of the Jew who lives and breathes permanently at her side? How can she endlessly express a visceral hostility for what he must represent to her, even as she affectionately calls him “my Jew.” “Lord!” she writes to Ethel Smyth. “How I detest these savers up of merit, these gorged caterpillars; my Jew has more religion in one toe nail—more human love, in one hair.”127
Even as a newlywed, this was her thank-you note for armchairs received as a wedding gift: “my Jew had the one with the green border.” At a reception that Virginia found ghastly, “a good deal of misery was endured[,] Jews swarmed,” she found it quite natural that Leonard got on very well with Gertrude Stein, the guest of honor, himself being also a Jew. And Gertrude Stein seen as a Jewess, not a writer.128
Virginia’s alarming masochism, bound to what she detests and what has neither shape nor reality, but for which Leonard serves as her image—and Leonard’s masochism in letting her detest what has neither shape nor reality, even as he represents it and accepts her scorn. Even though she respects and often admires him. Unconsciously, perpetually conflicted with herself. Leonard’s solution: to be generally perceived as dominating her and declaring the law.
Whatever their alliance, their pleasure at being together, their affection, their oneness, how could they not hate each other, despite themselves, somewhere deep within?
Such underground operations can only erode the apparent peace that unites the couple. In 1937, they surface, resistant and triumphant, in a novel: The Years. The saga of the Pargiter family. A book written under duress because Virginia has forbidden herself any spontaneous outbursts. She has planned it to be a traditional, even academic novel, based on straightforward narrative, although “I am writing to a rhythm and not to plot”129 had been her watchword. Now she would tell a story, neither evoking nor invoking her subject. Her priority for this narrative: The Years must differ from her other novels. None of which holds the slight trace of anything having to do with Judaism, much less anti-Semitism, a topic Virginia only addresses in her personal writing, her letters and her diary. Until now: only three or four pages, but there we find the unspoken madness, the n
ausea Virginia experienced in living with Leonard Woolf, a Jew, who would contaminate their space, as she dreaded. Pages where Leonard serves as a model of what she despises, what she abhors, but which she seems never to acknowledge feeling as a kind of repugnance aimed at her husband. And which seems so at odds with the delightful familiarity, the mental and emotional closeness that will make them come to resemble each other physically as they grow older.
In this novel, which was meant to be objective, realistic, and free of all personal disclosures, where the unconscious was hardly to have a role, the very worst, most repressed symptom appears, elsewhere kept at bay. In pages that are lyrical even as Virginia meant them to be temperate, steady, concerned most with the story, a song filters through and bursts out, barbaric, unbridled, in Sara Pargiter’s voice … and it is Virginia’s song, which she thought she had renounced.
Sara Pargiter, ugly, vacant spinster, eternally puerile, slightly impaired mentally and physically, without purpose, Sara, almost inarticulate but lyrical, sometimes pierces through this determinedly realistic, even prosaic text with her irrational outbursts, unconnected to the story. Scansion animates her voice, litanies carry it, and thus what we hear through her are very much the rhythms, accents, outbursts of the author. And what this voice expresses, in a scene that has no other reason to be there, is her instinctive, visceral disgust for a Jew about whom we know nothing, except that he is Jewish. In 1937, Hitler is in power, and in The Years, which has just appeared, Sara’s small voice says: “The Jew … pah!”130