The Artist-Figure, Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf's Novels

Ann Ronchetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415970327
• eBook ISBN: 9781135878375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature générale

This book explores the relationship between aesthetic productivity and artists' degree of involvement in social and sexual life as depicted in Virginia Woolf's novels. Ann Ronchetti locates the sources of Woolf's lifelong preoccupation with the artist's relationship to society in her family heritage, her exposure to Walter Pater and the aesthetic movement, and the philosophical and aesthetic interests of the Bloomsbury group.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Perhaps nowhere in her essays does Virginia Woolf render her view of the writer's relationship to life as his or her subject matter as succinctly as she does in “Life and the Novelist,” first published in The New York Herald Tribune on November 7, 1926. She begins her essay by noting what she believes is a significant difference between the novelist and other artists: “The novelist—it is his distinction and his danger—is terribly exposed to life” (CE2: 131). Unlike those artists who paint or compose in their studios, the novelist deliberately positions him- or herself among others in order to receive those impressions that become the raw material of fiction: “He fills his glass and lights his cigarette, he enjoys presumably all the pleasures of talk and table, but always with a sense that he is being stimulated and played upon by the subject-matter of his art” (CE2: 131). As Woolf is quick to point out, however, the actual crafting of the work of fiction for most writers takes place in isolation:

They have finished the wine and paid the bill and gone off, alone, into some solitary room where, with toil and pause, in agony (like Flaubert), with struggle and rush, tumultuously (like Dostoevsky) they have mastered their perceptions, hardened them, and changed them into the fabrics of their art. (CE2: 131)

Published a year after Mrs. Dalloway (1925), her first critical success, Woolf's essay presents a view of the writer as a traveler between two worlds, the world of everyday life, in which he or she interacts socially with his or her fellows, observing their behavior and the surrounding scene, and the world of the study, to which the writer retreats in order to transmute his or her impressions into the work of fiction. In Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce, Maurice Beebe explores the geography of this terrain both for practicing writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and for the often self-reflexive artist-figures in their fiction. Beebe identifies two traditions that illustrate the degree of a writer's involvement in everyday life. That of the Sacred Fount “tends to equate art with experience and assumes that the true artist is one who lives not less, but more fully and intensely than others. Within this tradition, art is essentially the re-creation of experience” (13). Alternatively, the Ivory Tower tradition, one that flourished in late nineteenth-century European literature, “equates art with religion rather than experience,” and considers it above life (13). In this tradition, “the artist can make use of life only if he stands aloof” from it (13).

Tracing the origins of the Künstlerroman back to Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; final version 1787) and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6), Beebe describes the condition of “the typical artist-hero” as that of a

… Divided Self … wavering between the Ivory Tower and the Sacred Fount, between the “holy” or esthetic demands of his mission as artist and his natural desire as a human being to participate in the life around him. (18)

In his analysis of the fiction of Balzac, James, Proust, and Joyce, Beebe argues that in the best fiction, the two traditions “are successfully reconciled” (66). For example, “The typical Jamesian artist,” Beebe notes, “is polite, clean, witty; a cultivated person as much at home over tea cups as at his desk or easel” (200). And Joyce's Stephen Dedalus is granted “the right, even the need, to form at least a partial compact with life” (295). Concerning Joyce himself Beebe states, “Not only is his art based on his experience, but he was also one of the most domestic of writers” (261).¹

Despite its seemingly simplistic nature, Beebe's argument highlights the importance of the theme of the artist's relationship to life in the work of several major late nineteenth-century and modernist authors. The fiction of Virginia Woolf also deserves scrutiny for its handling of this subject. As an experimental novelist, Woolf sought to develop a fictional method that would enable her to suggest the nature of life as experienced by the individual consciousness from moment to moment. As essays like “Modern Fiction” (1919) and her diary entries reveal, Woolf was impatient with her generation's Victorian legacy of fictional conventions in the materialist mode, “this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner” (D3: 209). She longed to develop a higher form of realism that would convey the “myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel” received by “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (“Modern Fiction,” CE2: 106). Throughout Woolf's writing career, life remained the basis of art as far as she was concerned; in her diaries and essays, she praises the work of authors as widely disparate as Cervantes, Defoe, and Chekhov for their ability to present the truth of life as experienced by individual human beings.² What she longed to see was a novelistic form that would more accurately and succinctly convey the essence of our experience of the world, that would “stand further back from life,” giving “the outline rather than the detail” (“The Narrow Bridge of Art,” CE2: 224–5).

Like a number of her predecessors and contemporaries, however, Woolf was also much absorbed with questions of the artist's relationship to the world, and the degree to which social and sexual engagement enhances or hinders the extent and quality of his or her creativity. As is often the case in the earliest fiction of a writer's career, Woolf's first novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), address these questions from a number of angles. Both books present young people who are amateurs in the arts or some intellectual endeavor, or would-be artists or writers who have reached the age where key life decisions must be made—whether to pursue the bar or academic life, as in St. John Hirst's case, or whether to continue one's career as a lawyer or move to the countryside to write, as in the case of Ralph Denham. Unlike other major authors, however, Woolf's absorption with this theme continued throughout her writing career, receiving even greater attention in To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts (1941), each of which has as a central character an aspiring or practicing artist or writer who must wrestle with his or her identity as a creative individual and as a human being, and negotiate his or her relationship to society and the world at large.

A brief survey of Woolf's background and the cultural context in which she reached maturity as a writer reveals a number of factors that may account for her unusually strong preoccupation with the nature of the artist's relationship to life. Woolf was born into a large Victorian family with a formidable artistic and intellectual heritage. Her maternal lineage included the Pattles, who had ties to the Pre-Raphaelite painters; as a young girl, Woolf's mother, Julia Jackson, had often visited Little Holland House, her aunt Sara Princep's home, and a “hothouse of aestheticism,” according to Phyllis Rose in her biography of Woolf (10). Guests there included Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, and Tennyson, among others.³ Another visitor, sculptor Thomas Woolner, who with Rossetti and Holman Hunt had founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was one of Julia's suitors. Julia herself had served as a model for painters Burne-Jones and Watts, sculptor Marochetti, and photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who was also her aunt (Panken 20).

While growing up at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, Woolf faced a constant reminder of the family's connection to Thackeray in the person of her mentally disturbed half-sister Laura, Leslie Stephen's only child by his first wife, Harriet Thackeray, a daughter of the famous novelist. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Stephen's sister-in-law and a popular novelist in her own right, proved a lively, robust presence with her frequent visits to the Stephen household during Woolf's girlhood.

By 1882, the year of Woolf's birth, her father, Leslie Stephen, had already become a prominent literary figure in England, editing The Cornhill Magazine and assuming the general editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography, for which Stephen himself would write a number of the entries. Woolf in effect grew up in a house with an elderly father who was also an intellectual and a man of letters in the habit of retreating to his study on the fourth floor for hours on end. Stephen provided his young daughter with ample opportunity to observe at close hand the various compromises that family life demanded of one of his scholarly temperament over the years. Her portrait of Mr. Ramsay, based largely upon her father, in To the Lighthouse foregrounds some of these compromises with particular poignancy.⁴

As Woolf's biographers have noted, Stephen encouraged his daughter to become a writer by giving her access to his personal library and discussing history, biography, and literature with her. According to Katherine Hill, Stephen expected Woolf to become his “literary and intellectual heir,” following his lead as an essayist, reviewer and historian (351).⁵ But as a number of biographers and critics has argued, Woolf's assumption of the role of writer served a crucial function in enabling her to negotiate the demands of living and establish an independent identity. Rose states that already as a young girl, Woolf was “training herself to be a writer, finding in writing a happier reality, an alternative to family life” in the tumultuous Stephen household (29). Louise DeSalvo views Woolf's early writing efforts as an attempt “to carve out an identity separate from the rest of the family” (Virginia Woolf 242–3). As Woolf's own comments in her diary attest, writing became essential to her well-being: “I cd. make some interesting perhaps valuable notes, on the absolute necessity for me of work” (D5: 44). For Woolf, writing served as a vital means of integrating reality and uniting the various facets of the self; while driving through Richmond one evening, she realized

… something very profound about the synthesis of my being: how only writing composes it: how nothing makes a whole unless I am writing…. (D4: 161)

For one for whom writing served such critical functions, then, the relationship of the artist or writer to the world became a central concern. Woolf's gender brought added immediacy to the issue, as the relationship between women artists and society was particularly problematic for the women of her generation. Raised in a household that respected learning and intellectual activity, but nonetheless insisted upon adherence to traditional gender roles, Woolf, like her sisters, was also expected to marry and have children. Her ambivalence toward marriage and motherhood may be traced to her loss at age thirteen of her overworked mother, who apparently catered selflessly to the needs of her emotionally demanding husband and their extended family. The death only a few years later of Woolf's half-sister Stella during her first pregnancy most likely reinforced Woolf's fears concerning heterosexual relations (Rose 15). And as DeSalvo argues, Woolf's subjection to sexual abuse by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth adversely affected the expression of her sexuality in adulthood (Virginia Woolf 87). As painting did for her sister Vanessa, writing would become Woolf's means of establishing an autonomous identity apart from that of wife and mother. For Woolf it seems to have become a substitute for motherhood as well. Her diaries are sprinkled with references to her books as her children, and she occasionally describes the process of writing in terms of sexual reproduction and maternity.⁶

Although Woolf was understandably fearful of heterosexual relations and claimed herself “a great amateur of the art of life” (D5: 346), as an upper middle-class woman with a modest independent income, an unusually supportive husband, and no children, Woolf occupied a comparatively privileged position as an aspiring woman writer. Throughout her life, however, she felt handicapped in her profession as a result of her sheltered upbringing and limited formal education. As she noted in her diary in 1928, she “should have liked a closer & thicker knowledge of life” (D3: 201). Woolf bitterly resented not having had the opportunity to obtain a university education, and explored at length the reasons why the “daughters of educated men” (TG 4) were largely denied this opportunity in her polemical work, Three Guineas (1938). Throughout her life, Woolf remained painfully aware of the limitations that her gender and class imposed on her as a writer, as A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, “Professions for Women,” and “The Leaning Tower” make clear. The most lamentable was her restricted exposure to life in its variety and complexity. As her biographers and friends have noted, Woolf was in the habit of asking people from other classes numerous questions about their daily lives in an effort to extend her awareness of the diversity of human experience.⁷

Given Woolf's status as a daughter who was herself struggling to establish an autonomous identity as a woman and a writer in an intellectually prominent upper middle-class family with direct ties to the world of artists and writers, it is not surprising that she was much concerned with questions of the artist's relationship to social and sexual life and the surrounding world. At least two other factors account for Woolf's deep and lifelong deliberation on these questions. The first is a legacy that Woolf shared to varying degrees with a number of other writers of her generation—that of Walter Pater and aestheticism. The origins of this late nineteenth-century literary and cultural phenomenon extend back to the earliest years of the century, ranging from such diverse sources as Keats's fascination with sensation, the Neo-Platonism of the Oxford Movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Ruskin's art criticism, and Matthew Arnold's cultural criticism, as well as the Symbolist movement, which emerged in Paris in mid-century and was itself influenced by the poetry, fiction, and critical theories of Edgar Allan Poe.

That Woolf was aware of these authors and movements and had read their works (with the possible exception of some of the French Symbolists), one can safely assume, based on her frequent use of her father's wide-ranging library, which included numerous titles in literature and literary history.⁸ Arnold would have been a constant ghostly presence at 22 Hyde Park Gate, particularly in Leslie Stephen's study, as Stephen had by that time assumed Arnold's mantle as England's “leading man of letters” (Rose 5). That Woolf read and appreciated Ruskin, though not uncritically, is evidenced by the fact that she produced two known essays about him— “Ruskin,” first published in the collection The Captain's Death Bed and Other Stories (1950), and “Praeterita,” originally published in The New Republic on December 28, 1927.⁹

Woolf's exposure to Walter Pater is thought to have begun with her reading of the first edition of Pater's Imaginary Portraits, published in 1887, a presentation copy of which the author had left at the Stephen home during that year. As Perry Meisel notes in The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater, this was the only book by Pater in Leslie Stephen's library until 1898 (12). Meisel conjectures that “perhaps as early as 1902,” Woolf acquired Pater's works in Macmillan's Edition de Luxe (1900–1901) for her own use (16). Of these, Woolf apparently held Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (1885) in particularly high esteem at the time. In “Old Bloomsbury,” written many years later during the early 1920s and read before Bloomsbury's Memoir Club, Woolf recounts one of her half-brother George's nocturnal visits to her room while her father lay dying of cancer downstairs: “It was long past midnight that I got into bed and sat reading a page or two of Marius the Epicurean for which I had then a passion” (MB 160).¹⁰ During her writing career Woolf never produced an essay exclusively on Pater, although two essays, “English Prose” (1920) and “The Modern Essay” (1922), praise him for his style (Meisel 81–2). In her preface to Orlando, she coyly acknowledges Pater's influence, among others. One should also note that in September 1898, Woolf began attending classes in Latin taught by Pater's elderly sister Clara, who, as Meisel notes, was closely associated with Oxford aestheticism and had been involved in establishing Somerville College, the second of Oxford's colleges for women (Meisel 17, 19).¹¹

Meisel provides a detailed analysis of the influence of Pater and his aesthetic principles on Woolf's writing, particularly on her work as critic and reviewer. In the two authors’ critical essays he notes a shared “vocabulary of judgment and analysis” (73), a search for the perfect fusion of form and matter in the work of art (59), the desire that superfluity be eliminated from the work of art (56), the requirement that the author or artist exercise self-discipline, or “ascesis” (Pater's term; 56), the criterion that the author's or artist's work express his or her personality (40), and the use of shared figures of speech (xiv), especially alchemical or metallurgical metaphors, to describe the artist in the act of receiving impressions and transforming them into a work of art. Meisel detects Pater's influence on Woolf's fiction in its concern with “the languages of sense and perception” (44), its detailed descriptions of its characters’ thoughts and sensations (13), and its use of “the moment,” which Meisel traces back through Conrad and Hardy to Pater, Wordsworth, and Hegel, among others (47).

Part of Meisel's thesis is that Woolf appropriated aspects of Pater's aestheticism as a young writer in an attempt to break with the patriarchal Victorian tradition that fiction should be morally edifying, one to which her fath...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS
• STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: The Voyage Out
• Chapter Three: Night and Day
• Chapter Four: Jacob’s Room
• Chapter Five: Mrs. Dalloway
• Chapter Six: To the Lighthouse
• Chapter Seven: Orlando
• Chapter Eight: The Waves
• Chapter Nine: The Years
• Chapter Ten: Between the Acts
• Chapter Eleven: Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index