PART I
Lesbian Intersections
ONE
Introduction
EILEEN BARRETT
In the 1970s, feminist scholars inaugurated a resurgence of critical and popular attention to Virginia Woolfâs life and work. Woolfâs writings are now essential to classroom and critical studies of modernism, women writers, feminist theory, and lesbian and gay studies. Interest in her life and writing extends beyond the universities to those whom she called common readers, and her image is prominently displayed in a range of venues, from Hanif Kureishiâs avant-garde film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid to an episode of the popular television program Murphy Brown, to evoke the radical feminist politics with which she is associated. Sally Potterâs film version of Orlando and Eileen Atkinsâ Vita and Virginia, a stage adaptation of the love letters between Sackville-West and Woolf, have increased public awareness of Woolfâs lesbianism. Visitors to the Lesbian and Gay Reading Room of the new San Francisco Public Library will see Virginia Woolf among the names of other famous lovers of their sex inscribed in the ceiling mural. Clearly, Virginia Woolf is one of the twentieth centuryâs best-known lesbians.1
Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings represents the first book devoted to Woolfâs lesbianism. Emerging out of the groundbreaking scholarship that precedes us, our collection develops a range of reading practices that shows how Woolfâs private and public experience and knowledge of same-sex love influence her writings. The thirteen personal narratives and scholarly essays reflect the latest approaches in lesbian-feminist criticism. Intertextual readings cover Woolf and lesbian love in the life and work of such figures as Katherine Mansfield, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen. Our writers provide interpretations of the novels and shorter fiction aimed at deciphering Woolfâs complex lesbian codes, analysis of Woolfâs reactions to contemporary sexologistsâ definitions of lesbians and gay men, and discussions of Woolfâs relationships to authors who also coded lesbian and gay themes in their writing.
We have divided Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings into two parts that we hope enhance the appreciation of Woolfâs significance to conceptions of lesbianism both in her own and in our times. âLesbian Intersectionsâ includes work that explores how Woolf reads love between women in the work of her nineteenth-century precursors. It also contains personal narratives that trace the experience of reading Woolf through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Three of its essays consider Woolf in the context of her lesbian contemporaries; juxtaposing Woolf with Mansfield, Stein, and Larsen, these essays suggest how techniques for inscribing lesbianism compare to developing concepts of modernism. âLesbian Readings of Woolfâs Novelsâ includes seven essays that provide lesbian interpretations of the individual novels: The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, The Years, and Between the Acts. These essays break new ground in our understanding of the role Woolfâs love for women plays in her major works. More important, they shift the emphasis of lesbian interpretations from Woolfâs life to her work.
Women were always central to Virginia Woolfâs life and work. She lived in a milieu that included many lesbians and gay men, and she had passionate relationships with a number of women. As this collection demonstrates, her lesbian experiences, explicitly expressed throughout her letters and diaries, influenced her short fiction, essays, and novels. Throughout her writing, Woolf resisted what she referred to as the âperpetually narrowing and namingâ of lesbian and homosexual love; instead, as our essays show, she developed an intricate, multifaceted style to convey âthese immensely composite and wide flung passionsâ (L 4: 200). Familiar with the literary tradition of same-sex love and with the social tradition of romantic friendships, Woolf created an expansive language with which to depict women loving women. By the late 1920s, she was referring proudly to herself as âthe mouthpiece of Sapphismâ (L 3: 530).
Woolfâs lesbian attractions were common knowledge to her intimate friends and family. Her flirtatious correspondence with Violet Dickinson includes such disclosures as âI am so susceptible to female charms, in fact I offered my blistered heart to one in Paris, if not twoâ (L 1: 69â70). Well informed of her sisterâs attractions for women, Vanessa Bell teased Virginia in a 1906 letter: âNaughty Billy, to get up a flirtation in the train. You really arenât safe to be trusted alone. I know some lady will get a written promise of marriage out of you soon and then where will you be?â (37). Although there is no evidence that Woolf ever promised marriage to a lady, her first engagement was decidedly unconventional. In 1909, she accepted Lytton Stracheyâs marriage proposal knowing that his attractions were for men. âI should like Lytton as a brother in law better than anyone I know,â Bell jested with her sister six months before the proposal, âbut the only way I can perceive of bringing that to pass would be if he were to fall in love with [their brother] Adrianâ (67). Most likely, Woolf sought the companionship in marriage with Strachey that she eventually achieved with Leonard Woolf. Bell implied as much in a letter of 1910, when she compared her sisterâs powers of homoerotic seduction to Stracheyâs. âReally, what with your cultivation of Sapphism ⊠and Lyttonâs of Sodomism ⊠you will be a fine couple worthy of each other when you both come outâ (94). Although they agreed to call off the marriage, Lytton remained, in Woolfâs estimation, âperfect as a friend, only heâs a female friendâ (L 1: 492).
In Moments of Being Woolf describes her relief upon discovering that like Strachey âthe majority of the young men who cameâ to visit in Bloomsbury âwere not attracted by young womenâ (194). This homoerotic environment enabled her to continue to explore her own same-sex attractions. For example, Vanessa Bell considered Ottoline Morrell a serious contender for her sisterâs affections, writing to Virginia in a 1909 letter, âYou will have a desperate liaison with [Ottoline] I believe, for I rather think she shares your Sapphist tendencies and only wants a little encouragementâ (84). Twelve years later, Woolf vividly recalled the erotic relationship with Morrell as âfull of âlustre and illusionââ (MOB 195). In 1912, when she accepted Leonardâs marriage proposal, she bluntly admitted: â⊠I feel no physical attraction in you. There are momentsâwhen you kissed me the other day was oneâwhen I feel no more than a rockâ (L 1: 496). Although, as Mark Hussey suggests, in marrying Leonard, Woolf âchecked her homoeroticism by entering a heterosexual relationshipâ (âRefractionsâ 144), her interest in heterosexuality did not increase with sexual consummation. âWhy do some of our friends change upon losing chastity?â she asked Katherine Cox in a letter written shortly after her marriage. âPossibly my great age makes it less of a catastrophe; but certainly I find the climax immensely exaggeratedâ (L 2: 6).
Woolf knew many women who lived with other women in a variety of arrangements. She once described a vacation she and Leonard shared with Margaret Llewelyn Davies and Lilian Harris. âWhen Margaret gets excited she calls her âJohn,â and Miss Harris calls Margaret âJimââ (L 2: 119). In the 1930s, she recounted a memorable meeting with Charlotte Wolff, the author of the famous study of English lesbians, Love between Women (D 4: 357); and toward the end of her life she fell in love with Octavia Wilberforce, the life partner of Elizabeth Robins (L 6: 462, 465). Such attractions for women and interest in lesbian relationships led her to avow, âMuch preferring my own sex, as I do, ⊠[I] intend to cultivate womenâs society entirely in future. Men are all in the light always: with women you swim at once into the silent duskâ (L 3: 164).
The woman whose society Woolf most cultivated was Vita Sackville-West. âShe is a pronounced Sapphist,â Woolf wrote with excitement shortly after meeting her, â& may, thinks Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I amâ (D 2: 235). But far from waiting passively for this seduction, Woolf also declared, âTo tell you a secret, I want to incite my lady to elope with me nextâ (L 3: 156). Although not without its complexity and pain, this love affair remained the most profound of Woolfâs life. In the 1930s, when the passion between Woolf and Sackville-West was in its decline, Woolf met Ethel Smyth, another woman who stirred her lesbian imagination. Of Smythâs energetic correspondence Woolf exclaimed, âI get, generally, two letters daily. I daresay the old fires of Sapphism are blazing for the last timeâ (D 3: 306). She admired Ethelâs creativity and respected her worldliness; as Woolf put it, she has âtaken her own way in shirt & tie vigorously unimpededâ (D 3: 313). Encouraged by Smythâs feminist activism and friendship, Woolf urged other women to write openly about sexuality: âAll that we have ought to be expressedâmind and bodyâa process of incredible difficulty and dangerâ (P 164). Finally, Woolf not only loved, but loved being loved by Ethel: ââDâyou know Virginia, I dont like other women being fond of you.â âThen you must be in love with me Ethel.â âI have never loved anyone so muchââ (D 3: 314).
Despite such overtly lesbian material in the letters and diaries, biographers continue to view Virginia Woolf as Quentin Bellâs âsexless sappho.â In his recent biography Virginia Woolf (1995), James King exemplifies the pervasive obtuseness about Woolfâs lifelong attractions for women, which he suggests are âtriggered by a psychic search for the dead motherâ (79). Ignoring the exuberant eroticism of the letters, he reduces the affair between Sackville-West and Woolf to a Freudian simplification: âVita wanted to become a male lover who could compete for and win her motherâs embraces, whereas Virginiaâs desire was to be hugged and cared for by a maternal womanâ (336). In Kingâs final analysis, Woolf is a âeunuchâ (386). Twenty years separate the Bell from the King biography; still, the portrait remains of what Ellen Hawkes called âThe Virgin in the Bell Biography.â
Meanwhile, critics continue to contest Woolfâs lesbian identity. In an essay that explores explicit homoerotic imagery in the drafts of A Room of Oneâs Own, Ellen Rosenman nonetheless insists that âcontemporary definitions of lesbianism are not applicable to Woolfâs workâ (âSexual Identitiesâ 648). Yet as Bonnie Zimmerman points out, that rationale would never be used to argue, for example, that current definitions of marriage should not be applied to the work of modernist heterosexual writers. âWhy can we not use the word lesbian,â Zimmerman asks, âas we use marriage or wife or mother: to refer to a recognizable structure with content and meaning that may vary according to era or culture?â (âChloeâ 174). After all, when Rosenman considers the meaning of lesbian identity in England of the 1920s, she divorces it from any historical tradition and sees only the category of mannish lesbian. In contrast, Patricia Cramer argues that Woolfâs lesbian identity belongs within a âparticular lesbian traditionâ of writers who âadopt the homoerotic self as a center from which to oppose patriarchal values and to reimagine self and communityâ (âUndergroundâ 177). Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings challenges such narrow definitions of lesbianism as Rosenmanâs to reveal further the myriad ways in which Woolf expressed her lesbian-feminist identity.
Indeed, as Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow suggest and as the title of their collection Lesbian Texts and Contexts illustrates, once we shift the context in which we read Woolfâs and other writersâ work, their lesbian content becomes apparent. One of the earliest discussions of Woolfâs lesbian plots appears in Jeannette Fosterâs formidable study of lesbians in Western literature, Sex Variant Women in Literature, which was published in 1956 at the authorâs expense. With remarkable insight into the range of lesbian experience in Woolfâs work, Foster discusses Clarissaâs attraction to Sally Seton, notes Lilyâs lasting desire for Mrs. Ramsay, and praises Woolfâs defense of the âlesbian woman of personal integrityâ in Orlando (287). Blanche Cookâs influential ââWomen Alone Stir My Imaginationâ: Lesbianism and the Cultural Traditionâ highlights Woolfâs role in the literary history of modern lesbianism and connects Woolfâs feminism to her woman-identified sensibility. Considering Orlando with Djuna Barnesâs Ladies Almanack and Radclyffe Hallâs The Well of Loneliness, Cookâs essay underscores the varied representations of women-loving women that traditional literary history elides. In âIs âChloe Liked Oliviaâ a Lesbian Plot?â Bonnie Zimmerman uncovers the lesbianism in Woolfâs sapphic vision of female collaboration and friendship. Jane Marcus reads A Room of Oneâs Own alongside Hallâs The Well of Loneliness, names Woolfâs subversive writing style âSapphistry,â and explores how through an array of rhetorical strategies, Woolf seduces her female readers. Such attention to Woolfâs relationship to other lesbian writers and traditions of lesbian literature, as well as to her lesbian audience, has enabled the current generation of critics to decode even further the erotic in Woolfâs lesbian plots.
Audre Lorde defines the erotic as âan assertion of the lifeforce of womenâ (55). And although she recognizes that we live in a culture that ârobs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appealâ (55), Lorde conceives the erotic as âa well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enoughâ (54). Woolf, like Lorde, struggled to express the erotic, to describe âwomens bodies for instanceâtheir passionsâ (P xxxix). Still, as this collection reveals, she persisted in her search for an erotic language that would embody the sensation as well as the replenishing force of women loving women. As Woolf puts the question: âIf one could be friendly with women, what a pleasureâthe relationship so secret & private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it? truthfully?â (D 2: 320).
âLesbian Intersectionsâ opens with Toni McNaronâs reflective essay âA Lesbian Reading Virginia Woolf.â In describing her experience of reading Woolf over the past thirty years, McNaron sheds light on critical issues involved when one reads Woolf as a lesbian. McNaron notes how many of us read in an environment that forces us to hide our own lesbianism; we are trained to read, as she puts it, through âheterosexist blinders.â Trying to understand why and how she had missed the lesbian significance of Woolfâs erotic scenes, McNaron developed her own âlesbian-feminist theorizing about reader response.â Suzanne Bellamy describes her essay, âThe Pattern behind the Words,â as a love story tracing Woolfâs influence on her own life as a writer and sculptor. Claiming the freedom of the common reader, Bellamy envisions Woolf as her lesbian muse, as her âmost potent mythic companion.â Bellamy conveys how Woolfâs writing inspires, resonates, and intersects with her own creative work. Noel Furieâs perceptive photographs of Bellamyâs sculpture illustrate another intersection of the lesbian aesthetic.
Jane Lilienfeldâs ââThe Gift of a China Inkpotâ: Violet Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte BrontĂ«, and the Love of Women in Writingâ explores lesbian intersections between Woolf and her nineteenth-century precursors. Woolfâs erotically charged friendship with Violet Dickinson encouraged her to write; it also, as Lilienfeld demonstrates, enabled her to see the lesbian loves in other women writersâ lives.
Katherine Mansfield shared not only Woolfâs love for women but also her interest in modernist technique. In âReading Influences: Homoeroticism and Mentoring in Katherine Mansfieldâs âCarnationâ and Virginia Woolfâs âMoments of Being: âSlaterâs Pins Have No Points,âââ Janet Winston captures how Mansfield, alone among Woolfâs literary friends, understood the artistic and personal effort required to write about erotic love for women. Winston interprets the complexity of Mansfieldâs and Woolfâs homoerotic âreading influences,â naming their relationship a mutual mentorship that validates each womanâs life and work.
Looking at the critical reception of Woolf and Gertrude Stein, Corinne E. Blackmer wonders why they have never been considered in tandem as the most significant lesbian modernists. Blackmerâs juxtapositions of both writersâ lesbian short fiction in âLesbian Modernism in the Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Steinâ supports her contention that these writersâ intersecting vision of creative, independent lesbians is a defining moment in modernist writing. Tuzyline Jita Allan demonstrates intersections between the personal and intellectual histories of Woolf and Nella Larsen. Pairing Mrs. Dalloway with Passing, Allan reveals the striking similarities between both novelsâ expressions of same-sex love; at the same time, âThe Death of Sex and the Soul in Mrs. Dalloway and Nella Larsenâs Passingâ explores how race and class affect lesbian passing.
Blanche Cook notes that throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a âvariety of lesbian literature coexisted with the vigorous denial of lesbianism in general and the unending difference in manner and style among lesbian women in particularâ (719). By interpreting Woolf in the context of some of this literature, the essays in âLesbian Intersectionsâ reclaim the varied styles and manners not only of lesbian writing but also of lesbian life.
NOTES
1. See Silver, âWhatâs Woolf Got to Do with It?â for a probing analysis of Woolf as an icon of popular culture.
TWO
A Lesbian Reading Virginia Woolf
TONI A. H. McNARON
In 1964, I received a Ph.D. in English literature and history without ever having been required or even encouraged to read Virginia Woolf. Granted, my training was in the Renaissance, and at that time most academics would not have known of Woolfâs many critical essays about that period and its great writers. The only novel of hers that I knew about was To the Lighthouse, pressed into my hands by a lover, not a professor. But she definitely was an ardent fan of the tall, horsey British woman and was eager to have me be kno...