Recycling is a relatively recent term, first known to have been used in 1925, and which has become fashionable more recently when issues related to the protection of the environment and its resources have become more pressing. Virginia Woolf herself does not use the term. However, her work has been repeatedly recycled over the years into novels, performances or music such as Robin Lippincottâs Mr Dalloway (1999), Lisa Petersonâs production of The Waves (2018) or Olga Neuwirthâs operatic version of Orlando at the Vienna State Opera (2019). Woolfâs figure has even become a cultural object recycled over mugs, tapestries, prints or posters: this is what Martin Kemp calls an iconic image, that is,
Woolf the Recycler
According to the OED and the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the first meaning of the term ârecycleâ is âto reuse (material)â (OED), âto processâ, to ârecoverâ, to âreuseâ (Merriam-Webster). The first occurrence of the term has been traced by the OED as going back to â1925 U.S. Patent 1,566,796 7/2. With such cyclic operation, it is readily possible to recycle sufficient ammonia to insure that substantially all of the phenolic compounds will be driven off so that they may be recoveredâ. The word was thus initially used in the transitive sense of âTo reuse (material) in an industrial process; to return (material) to a previous stage of a cyclic processâ. In that sense, Woolf can be said to be a recycler. Indeed, she literally recycled paper, using it again and again, writing on one side, and later, on the other. For example, she typed the short story âThe Symbolâ on 1 March 1941 âon the verso side of pages from the later typescript of Between the Acts and âAnonââ (Dick 319). While today, we would read such a gesture as significant of a concern for the environment, during the Second World War when there was a shortage of paper, it was a way to save paper; indeed, paper rationing had been introduced in February 1940.
More tellingly, Virginia Woolf recycled material such as her own 1899 Warboys diaries; as FrĂ©dĂ©rique Amselle has shown, she cut pages from her own diary and stuck them âinto a bound eighteenth-century book she had bought for that purpose, Logic or the Right Use of Reason by Isaac Wattsâ (89, my translation), either in place of pages she had torn or directly on pages of the book.1 Collage, the epitome of modernist writing, practised literally by Woolf, can be regarded as a form of recycling or âprocessing (waste) so as to convert it into a usable formâ or âreclaiming (a material) from waste so that it may be reusedâ, the second meaning of the term ârecycleâ, according to the OED; from waste, Woolf creates some new material, here a work of art or even âa spectacular art objectâ (Amselle 89).2 Recycling is here associated to tampering with the materiality of a book in order to create a work of art. This is what painters such as Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque did when they used newspaper clippings, pieces of fabric or oil cloth, used wallpapers, rope and wood shavings in their Cubist collages3; it is also what such contemporary artists as ceramist Paul Scott do: Scott retrieves old material, old chipped plates and cups, valuable bone china or ordinary ones, and transforms them into his own works of art.4 Such a process is represented by Woolf in her short story published in 1920, âSolid Objectsâ: rather than pursuing a brilliant political career, the character takes to collecting broken china, pieces of iron or lumps of glass to adorn his mantelpiece where these fragments of waste are endowed with new life and meaning, the beauty and poetry of works of art. Recycling thus appears as either synonymous with or metaphoric of the creative artistic process.
Recycling, in its third meaning of âreusing, frequently in a slightly altered formâ (OED), is what Woolf does on a larger scale in her work with the works of others. She reuses texts of the past that have already been circulated and alters them. We may consider that Woolf gives her own definition of the recycling process when she writes in A Room of Oneâs Own: âFor we think back through our mothers if we are womenâ (72). If in the context of the essay, this statement reads more like an exhortation, since, as she shows, there have been few women writers over the centuries, Woolf herself practices this form of recycling: she, for instance, silently resorts to ideas developed by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), as Anna Snaith has shown,5 and adapts them while choosing for the title of her essay, as I would like to argue, a phrase Rebecca West first used in The Judge, published in 1922, seven years before A Room of Oneâs Own.6
However, Woolf also often thinks through her âfathersâ. Literally speaking, she borrows from her own father, Leslie Stephen; and metaphorically speaking, she borrows from her âfathersâ or predecessors, from William Shakespeare through to Victorian writers such as John Ruskin, Henry Sidgwick or Walter Pater, but also from her French or Russian âfathersâ, Michel de Montaigne or Anton Chekhov. The examples are many and have throughout the years been the objects of specific critical studies or been mentioned in critical studies devoted to Woolfâs many works. For example, Gillian Beer showed what Woolf owed to Charles Darwinâs evolutionary theory and Leslie Stephenâs History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century; Perry Meisel explored Walter Paterâs legacy to her in her criticism; I showed how Woolf entered into a silent dialogue with Leslie Stephen and Henry Sidgwick in her essay âOn Being Illâ (Reynier, âVirginia Woolfâs Ethicsâ) or with John Ruskin in the essays she published in Good Housekeeping magazine, weaving a whole discourse that reuses some of his aesthetic and political theses while adapting them (Reynier, Virginia Woolfâs Good Housekeeping Essays). It can therefore be asserted that Woolf does recycle the ideas of others, in the sense that she adapts them to a new use and alters them.
Woolf also repeatedly recycles her own writing, reusing the same themes or images or even at times quoting her own words, recycling thus hovering between recurrent obsessive metaphors, to use French critic Charles Mauronâs words, and self-citation. Jacobâs Room (1922), for instance, serves Woolf as a reservoir from which she dips at will in the early 1930s when writing the London essays she published in Good Housekeeping magazine: âOxford Street Tideâ draws on the description of the bustle of the street and its omnibuses in the novel (JR 61â62); âAbbeys and Cathedralsâ takes up the image of St Paulâs cathedral as âhaunted by ghosts of white marbleâ (JR 62) and the memory of the great Dukeâs victories, and turns the tombs of the âgreat statesmen and men of actionâ (Essays V: 302) into satirical emblems of worldly political power; the faces the narrator observes in London are compared with ârude illustrations, faces in a book whose pages we turn over and overâ in the novel (JR 94) and the image finds its way into âPortrait of a Londonerâ where Mrs Crowe virtually thumbs through a photograph album while talking about London: âas she spoke it seemed as if all the pages of London life for 50 years past were being lightly shuffledâ (Essays V: 596). More daringly, Woolf borrows in times of crisis from her fiction to convey the anxiety she feels and the difficulty she faces in voicing her sense of civilisation utterly fragmenting in wartime. In her diary of 31 May 1940, she resorts to the motto of Between the Acts, initially titled Pointz Hall (P.H. here), âScraps, orts and fragmentsâ â itself a reminiscence of Shakespeareâs Troilus and Cressida (V, ii) â to evoke the desperate fighting during the Dunkirk retreat when words failed her: âScraps, orts and fragments, as I said in P.H., which is now bubblingâ (WD 317).
Such is Woolfâs multi-faceted recycling method. It encompasses various forms of writing that are well-known but are generally discussed separately and rarely in terms of recycling. Recycling is a wide-encompassing term and a convenient way of describing Woolfâs kaleidoscopic writing method. Rather than adding more examples to illustrate Woolfâs recycling method, I would like to briefly assess it. Recycling may be for her a way to extend and highlight the meaning of the words of the predecessor (as she does with Leonard Woolfâs âThree Jewsâ in âThe Duchess and the Jewellerâ),7 or to upturn it in an ironic move (as she does with Ruskinâs architectural and political theses in her essays published in Good Housekeeping).8 Recycling thus hovers between homage and parody. In that case, recycling amounts to what is more generally called intertextuality, the interweaving of hypotexts and hypertexts, the dialogue between texts of the past and the present â a process often analysed with Mikhail Bakhtinâs theory of dialogism or GĂ©rard Genetteâs narratology.
On the whole, since Virginia Woolf recovers texts of the past, reuses them and alters them, it seems perfectly legitimate to describe her as a recycler, a practitioner of the art of âadaptive reuseâ.9 All the more so since what Woolf does with her predecessorsâ work is similar in terms of technique, adaptation, manipulation and innovation to what her successors have done with her own texts and that Monica Latham has studied at length in her monograph on the rewritings of Mrs Dalloway, A Poetics of Postmodernism an...
