Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity

Suzana Zink

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319719092
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

This book provides a fascinating account of rooms in selected works by Virginia Woolf. Casting them as spaces which are at once material, textual and emotional, the volume shows Woolf's rooms to be consistently connected to wider geographies of modernity and therefore central to her writing of gender, class, empire and the nation. The discussion moves "in and out of rooms, " from the focus on travel in Woolf's debut novel, to the archival function of built space and literary heritage in Night and Day, the university as a male space of learning in Jacob's Room, the iconic A Room of One's Own and its historical readers, interior space as spatial history in The Years, and rooms as loci of memory in her unfinished memoir. Zink masterfully shows the spatial formation of rooms to be at the heart of Woolf's interweaving of the political and the aesthetic, revealing an understanding of space as dynamic and relational.

© The Author(s) 2018

Suzana ZinkVirginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of ModernityGeocriticism and Spatial Literary Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71909-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Suzana Zink¹

(1)

Institute of English Studies, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

End Abstract

In a letter from Bronxville, New York, dated 6 February 1935, Isabel Forbes Milton—one of Woolf’s many contemporary readers who took the time to express their admiration in writing—offers what may be seen as an early critical response to rooms in Woolf’s work. Milton not only notes the recurrence of the room trope in Woolf’s writing but also uses it as a readerly strategy to engage with the author and her fiction. The letter, an extraordinary example of “proto-criticism,” is worth quoting at length:

My dear Virginia Woolf,

For years in Minnesota, in Illinois, I have been writing you letters in my mind. It seems a little strange that all that time when I was pursuing the leisurely peripatetic pace behind cloistered walls I should never have confided any of these messages to paper – & that now when I am still dizzied from the futile attempt to fit into the New York time-pattern […] I should at last get down to it. I suppose that is partly explained by the fact that I now have a room of my own (and $1200 a year!), where last night and this morning I have been propped up in bed reading you again – No leisure for my own pursuits comes legitimately with my room & stipend, since these are rewards for handling 150 different students every day in a highly organized, nervous public school. But I am indulging in the luxury of a sore throat today […].

Just outside my window a little black spaniel is sniffing the bright snow crust. I remember how you brought Flush aware & snuffing out of Elizabeth Barrett’s letters . […]

You have very few outdoor scenes in your writings, do you know? […]

Yes, it seems to me your people are always in rooms . Walls are clearly defined: – Orlando in his small chamber at his writing desk, or kneeling in the great hall to kiss Elizabeth’s hand. Bernard waiting for doors to open or shut in the café – or if your people are moving between rooms, there are the walls of long corridors or of city streets defined by buildings – or the sliding evanescent walls of consciousness.

I think of you, too, within walls – receding deeper & deeper into the background of whatever room you inhabit, & of that room of your own, & defining each mutation of the atmosphere as you move. […]

I often try to picture the house you live in. I can see you so vividly as you live at certain moments. Never in the morning, somehow, but in the afternoon or evening. Over & over I have imagined having tea with you. […] There are so many things I want to ask you. But I recall Pound’s doleful “I had over-prepared the event,” & content myself with awaiting your next book, knowing that I shall meet you fully there while you could never meet me freely anywhere. (Daugherty, “Letters from Readers” 138–9, emphasis in the original)¹

Milton starts by locating herself in the space and time of writing—her room on a sunny winter day—which takes her back to the imperative of A Room of One’s Own. Like some of Woolf’s other readers, she confesses that work takes most of her time, leaving little room for leisurely pursuits such as reading .² Writing to Woolf itself is a moment of stolen pleasure and the materialisation of other, unwritten messages—“letters in the mind.” The description of her surroundings then flows into Woolf’s fictional world: the slippage is made possible by the “little black spaniel” outside her window, whose appearance recalls the canine protagonist of the 1933 mock biography and prompts her observation on what she perceives as the scarcity of “outdoor scenes” in Woolf’s writing: “I wish you had to fetch lead pencils more often!” (138). The comment alludes to Woolf’s 1927 essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” where lead pencils constitute the narrator’s pretext for roaming the streets of London and “the only spoil we have retrieved from the treasures of the city” (E4: 491). The allusion, like the later, explicit reference to “On Not Knowing Greek,” suggests the reader’s familiarity with Woolf’s larger body of work.

Milton then revisits different rooms in Night and Day, recalled with clarity despite “hav[ing] not so much as beheld the cover of the book for three years,” an indication of the memorable character of the spatial representations evoked (138, emphasis in the original). These include the Hilbery drawing-room in Cheyne Walk where, placing herself within the scene, the reader joins the characters in a form of empathetic textual analysis. She then highlights the multilayered meaning of the room as physical and psychic space, expressed through the juxtaposition of material rooms and the “evanescent walls of consciousness” (139). The image conjures up porous boundaries and thresholds, as well as different types of space, from the intimate realm of Orlando’s chamber to public cafés, while the characters’ movements between rooms give rise to an analogy between the topography of interior space—“long corridors”—and the geography of the city: “streets defined by buildings” (139).

Next, the reader uses the room image in an attempt to “seize” Woolf through the imaginative exercise of picturing her “within walls,” but the object of her desire eludes her, “receding deeper and deeper into the background” (139). The voyeuristic exercise—unsurprising for a fan letter—is, however, soon abandoned in favour of a more authentic and freer place of encounter, Woolf’s next book, which Milton awaits with impatience. The material room where reader and writer might meet over tea—“[f]or I would rather meet you than any one alive in the world today”—is replaced by a textual place of encounter (139).

Milton, however, is no uncritical fan. Only twenty-three at the time, she is a demanding young reader, hoping from Woolf “that novel for which all of your others are studies” (140). She is a knowledgeable reader, too—displaying familiarity not only with Woolf’s novels and essays, but also with writers such as Ezra Pound, Katherine Mansfield, Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot, whose mention at different points in the letter gestures towards the wider space of modernism. In expecting “at last […] a novel which should be immediately of this time & indirectly of every time,” she calls for a work displaying both political awareness and universal appeal in its understanding of human consciousness, thus suggesting that Woolf’s work held potential for a more organic merging of the two (140).

Milton’s letter offers valuable insight into the reception of Woolf’s work by a transatlantic contemporary reader with a “natural” interest in “the literature of experimentation” (139). At the same time, it testifies to the reach of Woolf’s writing, shown to touch unwittingly the lives of a variety of readers, as well as to create communities of readers. The letter makes this clear in a passage where Milton relates how she became part of the “inner circle” of a woman “fifty years my senior” on admitting to having read Woolf (139). In the young reader’s words: “you have created other friends for me. I daresay you do not realize how many people you have drawn together” (139).

The idea of the writer’s voice reaching out to, and connecting, people is an observation echoed by other contemporary readers whose letters have recently been uncovered by Anna Snaith, Melba Cuddy-Keane and Beth Rigel Daugherty. This study adds to the growing body of work on contemporary readers’ responses to modernist writing by telling the story of yet another not-so-common reader, whose involvement in women’s causes resonated with Woolf’s feminist ideas. The virtual intersections between Mary Geraldine Ostle’s and Woolf’s work will be detailed later, but Milton’s comment about Woolf “drawing readers together” provides a suggestive point of entry into that particular story.

If the American fan displays remarkable insight into Woolf’s writing of rooms, she is less attentive to “the ways in which she documents, celebrates, fictionalises and transforms the activity of walking through urban spaces” (Shiach, “London Rooms” 50). Milton’s assumption about Woolf’s walking habits—“I have the impression that you have never walked much”—or her comment on the precedence of interior space over “outdoor scenes” in her work proves less perceptive than the rest of her letter (138). Her shortsightedness, however, is justifiable for a reader who, unlike Woolf’s present-day readership, did not have access to the wealth of biographical and autobiographical materials made available to the public in the latter decades of the twentieth century. These writings provide ample evidence of what Hermione Lee calls Woolf’s “life-long hobby of ‘street haunting,’” as does her fictional and non-fictional work (Virginia Woolf 206).

Lee’s reference to the much-discussed 1927 essay in relation to Woolf’s love of walking is significant. “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” offers a perfect example of the conjunction between interior and exterior space in Woolf’s writing: the “shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves,” on the one hand, and kaleidoscopic images of the city, on the other (E4: 481). The home left behind is the shell-house, an image which, however “hackneyed”—as the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard acknowledges in The Poetics of Space—retains its “primal” and “indestructible” meaning (121). Woolf’s essay ends on the narrator’s return home and with the admission that “it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round, and shelter and enclose the self which has been blown about at so many street corners” (E4: 491). The image is expressive of the fragility of the self exposed to the flux of the city, anticipating Bachelard’s metaphor of the house-less human...