Virginia Woolf

Lesbian Readings

Eileen Barrett, Patricia Cramer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780814789650
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire LGBT

The last two decades have seen a resurgence of critical and popular attention to Virginia Woolf's life and work. Such traditional institutions as The New York Review of Books now pair her with William Shakespeare in promotional advertisements; her face is used to sell everything from Barnes & Noble books to Bass Ale.

Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings represents the first book devoted to Woolf's lesbianism. Divided into two sections, Lesbian Intersections and Lesbian Readings of Woolf's Novels, these essays focus on how Woolf's private and public experience and knowledge of same-sex love influences her shorter fiction and novels. Lesbian Intersections includes personal narratives that trace the experience of reading Woolf through the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Lesbian Readings of Woolf's Novels provides lesbian interpretations of the individual novels, including Orlando, The Waves, and The Years.

Breaking new ground in our understanding of the role Woolf's love for women plays in her major writing, these essays shift the emphasis of lesbian interpretations from Woolf's life to her work.

PART I
Lesbian Intersections

ONE
Introduction

EILEEN BARRETT

In the 1970s, feminist scholars inaugurated a resurgence of critical and popular attention to Virginia Woolf’s life and work. Woolf’s 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 Kureishi’s 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 Potter’s film version of Orlando and Eileen Atkins’ Vita and Virginia, a stage adaptation of the love letters between Sackville-West and Woolf, have increased public awareness of Woolf’s 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 century’s best-known lesbians.¹

Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings represents the first book devoted to Woolf’s lesbianism. Emerging out of the groundbreaking scholarship that precedes us, our collection develops a range of reading practices that shows how Woolf’s 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 Woolf’s complex lesbian codes, analysis of Woolf’s reactions to contemporary sexologists’ definitions of lesbians and gay men, and discussions of Woolf’s 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 Woolf’s significance to conceptions of lesbianism both in her own and in our times. “Lesbian Intersections” 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. “Lesbian Readings of Woolf’s Novels” 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 Woolf’s love for women plays in her major works. More important, they shift the emphasis of lesbian interpretations from Woolf’s life to her work.

Women were always central to Virginia Woolf’s 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 “perpetually narrowing and naming” of lesbian and homosexual love; instead, as our essays show, she developed an intricate, multifaceted style to convey “these immensely composite and wide flung passions” (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 “the mouthpiece of Sapphism” (L 3: 530).

Woolf’s lesbian attractions were common knowledge to her intimate friends and family. Her flirtatious correspondence with Violet Dickinson includes such disclosures as “I am so susceptible to female charms, in fact I offered my blistered heart to one in Paris, if not two” (L 1: 69–70). Well informed of her sister’s attractions for women, Vanessa Bell teased Virginia in a 1906 letter: “Naughty Billy, to get up a flirtation in the train. You really aren’t 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?” (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 Strachey’s marriage proposal knowing that his attractions were for men. “I should like Lytton as a brother in law better than anyone I know,” Bell jested with her sister six months before the proposal, “but the only way I can perceive of bringing that to pass would be if he were to fall in love with [their brother] Adrian” (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 sister’s powers of homoerotic seduction to Strachey’s. “Really, what with your cultivation of Sapphism … and Lytton’s of Sodomism … you will be a fine couple worthy of each other when you both come out” (94). Although they agreed to call off the marriage, Lytton remained, in Woolf’s estimation, “perfect as a friend, only he’s a female friend” (L 1: 492).

In Moments of Being Woolf describes her relief upon discovering that like Strachey “the majority of the young men who came” to visit in Bloomsbury “were not attracted by young women” (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 sister’s affections, writing to Virginia in a 1909 letter, “You will have a desperate liaison with [Ottoline] I believe, for I rather think she shares your Sapphist tendencies and only wants a little encouragement” (84). Twelve years later, Woolf vividly recalled the erotic relationship with Morrell as “full of ‘lustre and illusion’” (MOB 195). In 1912, when she accepted Leonard’s marriage proposal, she bluntly admitted: “… I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock” (L 1: 496). Although, as Mark Hussey suggests, in marrying Leonard, Woolf “checked her homoeroticism by entering a heterosexual relationship” (“Refractions” 144), her interest in heterosexuality did not increase with sexual consummation. “Why do some of our friends change upon losing chastity?” she asked Katherine Cox in a letter written shortly after her marriage. “Possibly my great age makes it less of a catastrophe; but certainly I find the climax immensely exaggerated” (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. “When Margaret gets excited she calls her ‘John,’ and Miss Harris calls Margaret ‘Jim’” (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, “Much preferring my own sex, as I do, … [I] intend to cultivate women’s society entirely in future. Men are all in the light always: with women you swim at once into the silent dusk” (L 3: 164).

The woman whose society Woolf most cultivated was Vita Sackville-West. “She is a pronounced Sapphist,” Woolf wrote with excitement shortly after meeting her, “& may, thinks Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I am” (D 2: 235). But far from waiting passively for this seduction, Woolf also declared, “To tell you a secret, I want to incite my lady to elope with me next” (L 3: 156). Although not without its complexity and pain, this love affair remained the most profound of Woolf’s 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 Smyth’s energetic correspondence Woolf exclaimed, “I get, generally, two letters daily. I daresay the old fires of Sapphism are blazing for the last time” (D 3: 306). She admired Ethel’s creativity and respected her worldliness; as Woolf put it, she has “taken her own way in shirt & tie vigorously unimpeded” (D 3: 313). Encouraged by Smyth’s feminist activism and friendship, Woolf urged other women to write openly about sexuality: “All that we have ought to be expressed—mind and body—a process of incredible difficulty and danger” (P 164). Finally, Woolf not only loved, but loved being loved by Ethel: “‘D’you know Virginia, I dont like other women being fond of you.’ ‘Then you must be in love with me Ethel.’ ‘I have never loved anyone so much’” (D 3: 314).

Despite such overtly lesbian material in the letters and diaries, biographers continue to view Virginia Woolf as Quentin Bell’s “sexless sappho.” In his recent biography Virginia Woolf (1995), James King exemplifies the pervasive obtuseness about Woolf’s lifelong attractions for women, which he suggests are “triggered by a psychic search for the dead mother” (79). Ignoring the exuberant eroticism of the letters, he reduces the affair between Sackville-West and Woolf to a Freudian simplification: “Vita wanted to become a male lover who could compete for and win her mother’s embraces, whereas Virginia’s desire was to be hugged and cared for by a maternal woman” (336). In King’s final analysis, Woolf is a “eunuch” (386). Twenty years separate the Bell from the King biography; still, the portrait remains of what Ellen Hawkes called “The Virgin in the Bell Biography.”

Meanwhile, critics continue to contest Woolf’s lesbian identity. In an essay that explores explicit homoerotic imagery in the drafts of A Room of One’s Own, Ellen Rosenman nonetheless insists that “contemporary definitions of lesbianism are not applicable to Woolf’s work” (“Sexual Identities” 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. “Why can we not use the word lesbian,” Zimmerman asks, “as 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?” (“Chloe” 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 Woolf’s lesbian identity belongs within a “particular lesbian tradition” of writers who “adopt the homoerotic self as a center from which to oppose patriarchal values and to reimagine self and community” (“Underground” 177). Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings challenges such narrow definitions of lesbianism as Rosenman’s 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 Woolf’s and other writers’ work, their lesbian content becomes apparent. One of the earliest discussions of Woolf’s lesbian plots appears in Jeannette Foster’s formidable study of lesbians in Western literature, Sex Variant Women in Literature, which was published in 1956 at the author’s expense. With remarkable insight into the range of lesbian experience in Woolf’s work, Foster discusses Clarissa’s attraction to Sally Seton, notes Lily’s lasting desire for Mrs. Ramsay, and praises Woolf’s defense of the “lesbian woman of personal integrity” in Orlando (287). Blanche Cook’s influential “‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination’: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition” highlights Woolf’s role in the literary history of modern lesbianism and connects Woolf’s feminism to her woman-identified sensibility. Considering Orlando with Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Cook’s essay underscores the varied representations of women-loving women that traditional literary history elides. In “Is ‘Chloe Liked Olivia’ a Lesbian Plot?” Bonnie Zimmerman uncovers the lesbianism in Woolf’s sapphic vision of female collaboration and friendship. Jane Marcus reads A Room of One’s Own alongside Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, names Woolf’s subversive writing style “Sapphistry,” and explores how through an array of rhetorical strategies, Woolf seduces her female readers. Such attention to Woolf’s 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 Woolf’s lesbian plots.

Audre Lorde defines the erotic as “an assertion of the lifeforce of women” (55). And although she recognizes that we live in a culture that “robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal” (55), Lorde conceives the erotic as “a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough” (54). Woolf, like Lorde, struggled to express the erotic, to describe “womens bodies for instance—their passions” (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: “If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure—the relationship so secret & private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it? truthfully?” (D 2: 320).

“Lesbian Intersections” opens with Toni McNaron’s reflective essay “A Lesbian Reading Virginia Woolf.” 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 “heterosexist blinders.” Trying to understand why and how she had missed the lesbian significance of Woolf’s erotic scenes, McNaron developed her own “lesbian-feminist theorizing about reader response.” Suzanne Bellamy describes her essay, “The Pattern behind the Words,” as a love story tracing Woolf’s 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 “most potent mythic companion.” Bellamy conveys how Woolf’s writing inspires, resonates, and intersects with her own creative work. Noel Furie’s perceptive photographs of Bellamy’s sculpture illustrate another intersection of the lesbian aesthetic.

Jane Lilienfeld’s “‘The Gift of a China Inkpot’: Violet Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and the Love of Women in Writing” explores lesbian intersections between Woolf and her nineteenth-century precursors. Woolf’s 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 writers’ lives.

Katherine Mansfield shared not only Woolf’s love for women but also her interest in modernist technique. In “Reading Influences: Homoeroticism and Mentoring in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Carnation’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘Moments of Being: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points,”’” Janet Winston captures how Mansfield, alone among Woolf’s literary friends, understood the artistic and personal effort required to write about erotic love for women. Winston interprets the complexity of Mansfield’s and Woolf’s homoerotic “reading influences,” naming their relationship a mutual mentorship that validates each woman’s 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. Blackmer’s juxtapositions of both writers’ lesbian short fiction in “Lesbian Modernism in the Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein” supports her contention that these writers’ 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 novels’ expressions of same-sex love; at the same time, “The Death of Sex and the Soul in Mrs. Dalloway and Nella Larsen’s Passing” explores how race and class affect lesbian passing.

Blanche Cook notes that throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a “variety of lesbian literature coexisted with the vigorous denial of lesbianism in general and the unending difference in manner and style among lesbian women in particular” (719). By interpreting Woolf in the context of some of this literature, the essays in “Lesbian Intersections” reclaim the varied styles and manners not only of lesbian writing but also of lesbian life.

NOTES

1. See Silver, “What’s Woolf Got to Do with It?” 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 Woolf’s 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...