In the Hollow of the Wave

Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature

Bonnie Kime Scott

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780813932606
• eBook ISBN: 9780813932620
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Examining the writings and life of Virginia Woolf, In the Hollow of the Wave looks at how Woolf treated "nature" as a deliberate discourse that shaped her way of thinking about the self and the environment and her strategies for challenging the imbalances of power in her own culture—all of which remain valuable in the framing of our discourse about nature today. Bonnie Kime Scott explores Woolf's uses of nature, including her satire of scientific professionals and amateurs, her parodies of the imperial conquest of land, her representations of flora and fauna, her application of post-impressionist and modernist modes, her merging of characters with the environment, and her ventures across the species barrier.

In shedding light on this discourse of Woolf and the natural world, Scott brings to our attention a critical, neglected, and contested aspect of modernism itself. She relies on feminist, ecofeminist, and postcolonial theory in the process, drawing also on the relatively recent field of animal studies. By focusing on multiple registers of Woolf's uses of nature, the author paves the way for more extended research in modernist practices, natural history, garden and landscape studies, and lesbian/queer studies.

1

Toward a Greening of Modernism

We want something that has been shaped and clarified, cut to catch the light, hard as gem or rock with the seal of human experience in it, and yet sheltering as in a clear gem the flame which burns now so high and now sinks so low in our own hearts. We want what is timeless and contemporary.

Woolf, “Reading”

Yet the poetry often seems to come in precisely at the moment when the scientist and the science, the method and the newness go out.

Woolf, “What Is Poetry?”

DESPITE THE CHALLENGES of modernity, nature has a persistent, even adaptive, presence in modernism. Furthermore, the reinsertion of nature into modernist studies contributes to ongoing debates concerning sources of aesthetic form, the development of personal identity, survival of trauma, and the rebalancing of power and resources in the light of post-colonial and antiracist consciousness. Modernists regularly make reference to nature, or its control, in their writing. Natural interests of specific writers vary, as affected by factors such as geographical location, gender, race, class privilege, spirituality, and awareness and acceptance of scientific theory. This chapter investigates ways that a small set of Woolf's companion modernists developed discourses involving or excluding nature. While it is hoped that this work will contribute to a greening of modernism, this chapter will also provide context and direction for the more intensive study of Woolf's uses of nature that follows. Modernist rejection of nature came in part from the preference of classicism over Romanticism, as well as attraction to new technology and science. But modernists also discovered the impossibility of rejecting the natural world, given powerful early memories of place and sensation, and the experimental satisfaction that comes with imaginative merger of human and nonhuman other—one of the basic tropes of ecofeminism.

The Classical Version: Making It New through Technology

Modernist opposition to nature came largely from those who identified with a classicist approach, including the group labeled the “men of 1914,”¹ whose gender-biased version long enjoyed academic prowess. In manifestos and reviews, Wyndham Lewis, T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound conjure up formless, dark, decayed manifestations of nature to condemn what they consider inferior forms of writing; these they associate with decadence and the feminine.² Following the lead of Baudelaire, they turn toward urban settings. Science and mechanics, including the engines of war, furnish preferred masculine metaphors. Their gendering and diminishment of nature, and their goal to “make it new,” are in keeping with the broad patterns of culture reported by Sherry Ortner in her provocatively titled 1974 essay, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Ortner observes, “Every culture, or, generally ‘culture’ is engaged in the process of generating and sustaining systems of meaningful forms (symbols, artifacts, etc.) by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to its purposes, controls them in its interest” (72).³

T. E. Hulme, in his advocacy of classicism, provides a difficult scenario for incorporating nature into modernism. Classicism, as he defines it, is all about culture and its capacity to control expression. In his essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” he sides with those who are suspicious of human nature: “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him” (179). This contrasts to Romanticism, which is generally seen as the most nature-friendly of literary groupings. Hulme focuses his attack on Rousseau, citing the belief “that man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him.” Hulme faults the Romantics for their recourse to the infinite and mysterious, and for finding god in man. In reaching for a metaphor suitable to his goal of “accurate, precise and definite description,” he thinks first of an architect's variously curved wooden templates, but settles finally upon a springy piece of steel that can be bent precisely, using the pressure of the artist's own fingers. The goal with this implement is “to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally” (183–84). Hulme's favorite texture of “dry hardness” suggests that for him the best organism is a dead, or at least a desiccated, one.

Hulme does have some use for natural imagery and scientific understandings of nature. In “Romanticism and Classicism,” he identifies humans as animals. He acknowledges Darwinian theory of the progressive development of species, but he prefers a scientific alternative of mutations. In place of the infinite, Hulme commits his art to “the light of ordinary day.” This is a back-door way of saying that observations of everyday appearances on earth are germane, even to classicism. When he wants to express the complex relations of the imaginative mind, Hulme's analogy is to a lithe natural being: “The motion of a snake's body goes through all parts at once and its volition acts at the same instant in coils which go contrary ways” (185). In Further Speculations, Hulme even asserts, “There must be just as much contact with nature in an abstract art as in a realistic one” (qtd. in Schwartz 60–61).

Hulme's ideas on classicism complemented the interest in immediate experiences and mental control characteristic of that founding group of modernist poets, the imagists. “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective”: this first principle, codified by F. S. Flint and endorsed by Ezra Pound, gives nature an entry as an objective thing. Indeed, imagists and imagist affiliates, from H.D. and Richard Aldington to Amy Lowell and D. H. Lawrence, regularly took entities (plants, animals, and landscapes) from nature for their poetry, controlling them as subjectively perceived objects in ways that were not always dry and hard.

In “A Retrospect,” Pound intensifies the subjective aspect of the enterprise, centering more upon maker/perceiver than the potentially natural object. His “Image” presents “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (“complex” to be read in the “technical sense employed by the newer psychologists”) (60). In his analysis of Pound's celebrated haiku “In a Station of the Metro,” Sanford Schwartz offers a double scenario: “Analytically, these visionary experiences are projections of the subject's emotions onto the object; phenomenologically, however, the visionary form is as real and objective as the natural object that inspires the emotion, and the two appear together at one instant in a vision of nature transfigured” (68). In the second scenario, nature both inspires and coexists with emotion, however important human control is to the actual production of art. With Pound, we find all sorts of historical and cultural controls in the processing of natural images, but the images remain.

On numerous occasions, Pound sought to edit nature out of modernism, shaping modernist form and history. He convinced T. S. Eliot to eliminate large segments of seascapes originally in “The Waste Land.” For her influential little magazine, Poetry, Harriet Monroe favored American landscapes, against Pound's advice. Monroe's interest was consistent with her own environmental activism, dedicated to preservation of the American West, and backed by her writing of nature poetry.⁴

Wyndham Lewis, who conceptualized the notion of the “men of 1914,” generally agrees with Hulme's classicism. He has his own way of structuring gender and art on vertical, hierarchical planes. This scheme assigns masculinity and art to dry surface articulation and the feminine, as nature, to damp and chaotic depths of being.⁵ The title character of his novel Tarr groups “woman and the sexual sphere” with “jellyish diffuseness” that is the antithesis of Hulme's “dry hardness.” These “chaotic depths” may imply common origins in primordial ooze, where the feminine is contained; art and culture must rise above this. Lewis's proliferation of technologically produced objects—girders, gears, and bits of metal bent to specification, as in his painting Timon of Athens—relates well to Hulme's flexible steel template for art.

Lewis's construction of gender conforms with his assignment of men such as Marcel Proust, Lytton Strachey, and Roger Fry to a degenerate, feminine category. His personal conflict while involved in Roger Fry's Bloomsbury-affiliated Omega Workshop may have influenced his thinking. Lewis was further offended that in the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf detected “failures and fragments” in authors such as James Joyce. accordingly, Lewis ensconces her as the presiding figure in an enfeebled feminine artistic realm: “So we have been invited…to install ourselves in a very dim Venusburg indeed: but Venus has become an introverted matriarch, brooding over a subterraneous ‘stream of consciousness’—a feminine phenomenon after all” (138). This territory is both natural and urban and includes the deep feminine ooze of stream of consciousness. The city has degenerate, rather than modern, form: Swinburne's decadent Venusburg, Eliot's squalid “unreal city” in “The Waste Land,” and an effete Bloomsbury setting where Woolf presents “pretty salon pieces” (137). Here the visual system, generally prized as a perceptive channel, has become “myopic,” and figures of myth and legend are declared decadent. Lewis does show some familiarity with Woolf's work when he registers her as a “symbolic landmark—a sort of partylighthouse” (132). He satirizes “Prousts and sub-Prousts” who old-maidishly “shrink and cluster together, they titter in each other's ears, and delicately teehee, pointing out to each other the red-blooded antics of this or that upstanding figure, treading the perilous Without” (139)—the less sheltered world, even a wilderness where only the red-blooded males dare to work. Lewis charges that, in her account of modernism, Woolf misses what is robust and complete (read heterosexual and masculine) in Joyce and Lawrence (137) and in her own fiction offers “puerile copies” of the “realistic vigour” of Mr. Joyce (138).

In summarizing the action of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Lewis notes, without interpretation, that Mrs. Brown has been making conversation over the long-term effect of caterpillars attacking an old oak tree. That Woolf should come up with this natural drama in recording a fragment of dialogue spoken by the evasive Mrs. Brown suggests the effectiveness of invoking fragments of conversation overheard in everyday life, in modernist writing. Her complex natural image reinforces the situation that the elderly Mrs. Brown is facing, in an apparent attack by the demanding Mr. Brown.

In his querulous closing, Lewis offers an extraordinary mixture of natural and cultural metaphors to express his nausea over the power of the feminine mind, with Woolf as its adjudicator. “It has been with considerable shaking in my shoes, and a feeling of treading upon a carpet of eggs, that I have taken the cow by the horns in this chapter, and broached the subject of the part that the feminine mind has played…in the erection of our present criteria. For fifteen years I have subsisted in this suffocating atmosphere. I have felt very much a fish out of water” (140).⁶ Is it the ooze of eggs, messing the carpet of the suspect salon, or the resentment that cows should show horns, rather than produce milk, that demands his control? Introduced initially as an “introverted matriarch,” the Woolfian cow paradoxically evades maternity. I suggest that what oppresses Lewis is not the matriarch but the air of inversion, a queering of sexuality as well as gender, scripted as unnatural (the fish out of water), and classically equated with death and decay. Lewis was right in identifying Woolf's interest in depth and dampness, attributes associated with both death and primordial origins in her nature writing, and in her queering of both sexuality and expectations for the feminine.

Control and Loss of Natural Subjects in Eliot

T. S. Eliot, like Hulme, seeks to make more of the human animal through cultural control. After his conversion to the Anglican faith, such control increasingly involves religious icons and structures. Hulme introduced religion into his classicist program for combating human lapses. As Raymond Williams has noted, when Eliot's late works refer to nature, this is largely done to confirm the existence of God. Eliot shared Hulme's objections to Romanticism, his attitudes fed by Jules Laforgue, Irving Babbitt, and Charles Maurras. Eliot's celebrated “objective correlative,” more so than Pound's “complex in an instant of time,” controls the emotional response to some thing (often that subterranean feminine nature that so troubled Lewis), even as it uses the object's attributes to define the emotions. Eliot likes to formulate art in scientific terms. Thus, Hulme's pliable curves of steel have a counterpart in Eliot's filament of platinum, a catalyst that provides a useful analogy to the creative combinations achieved by the mature poet: “When the two gasses previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. The combination takes place only if the platinum is present…. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum” (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” 88).

Eliot is not limited to his own controlled container, however influential this theory may have been. To the disgust of Pound and Lewis, Eliot gladly ventured into “Venusburg,” playing the decadent in pale powder and eye shadow, and he set out to charm Bloomsbury. He published poetry and essays with Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, and exchanged confidences about his art with her as they rode through London in a cab, or when he came as her guest to Monk's House. Many of the remarks about his work that proved most useful to biographer Peter Ackroyd were garnered from just such confidences, recorded in Woolf's diaries and letters.

Woolf and Eliot shared comparable post-Victorian childhoods in contact with nature. Both had parents of advanced age who entertained Darwinian ideas.⁷ Eliot's childhood holidays in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on Cape Ann, offered him experiences similar to those little Virginia had at St. Ives in Cornwall. Lyndall Gordon, who makes a special point of the spirit of place provided to Eliot by Cape Ann, notes that he learned to identify seventy types of birds and various seaweeds. Eliot made an insect collection, combed through detritus on the shore, and examined crabs and sea anemones in costal rock pools. He learned to sail there, his parents feeling this would build up his delicate constitution. Young Eliot was fascinated by the yarns of fishermen, and he worked these into early school compositions and his mature work.

Winter meant a return to the city for Eliot, as it did for Woolf. His destination was St. Louis, where his father was president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. The city offered his first riparian landscape, the Mississippi, as it ran among the factories, much like Joyce's River Liffey. Eliot planned to title his childhood reminiscences “The River and the Sea,” and as Ackroyd notes, “These two natural forces run through all of his poetry, remembered even when they are absent in the landscape of desert or dry rock” (22). There was also a childhood garden in St. Louis, with a locked door in a wall, leading to a girl's school that he shyly visited. All of this is vaguely suggestive of the hedged garden Woolf explored in childhood at St. Ives, and of the psychological encounters of the children in the garden in The Waves. Of these children, Louis has been convincingly compared to Eliot, having a name suggestive of Eliot's St. Louis origin, a foreign (though Australian) accent, and a banker for a father (see Eder). Louis entertains images of the river as he departs London by train, bound to boarding school: “We are drawn though the booking-office on to the platform as a stream draws twigs and straws round the piers of a bridge” (W 20). Eliot's Burnt Norton has echoes of children's voices and partakes of the same privileged British garden sites that Woolf evokes throughout her writing, especially in The Waves.

The natural elements Eliot experienced, particularly in the summers at Cape Ann, survive as memories evoking lost possibilities in much of Eliot's poetry. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” brings back the insect collection, but here the protagonist is the specimen trapped on the pin, rather than a curious collector. “Prufrock” recollects the crab, but as a bodily fragment, and a means of escape from a feminine society that does not understand him: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (73–74). The poem ends with a timid walk on the beach, where mermaids sing to each other, but doubtfully to him. These fantasy females have the vivid experience of nature he lacks, riding on waves blown white and black by the wind, and “wreathed with seaweed red and brown” (127–28). In “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” memory's “clear relations / Its divisions and precisions” (6–7) have been dissolved by “lunar incantations” (4). This poem moves back and forth between images of nature and ones of city squalor, occasionally blending them “As a madman shakes a dead geranium” (12). Suggesting primitive origins of poetry, the street light “beats like a fatalistic drum” (9) and directs his attention toward feminine corruption as nature: “that woman/Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door” (17). He detects sand on the border of her torn dress, and the twist in the corner of her eye reminds him of

A twisted branch upon the beach

Eaten smooth, and polished

As if the world gave up

The secret of its skeleton,

Stiff and white. (25–29)

Nature has some vigor in the recollected encounter with “a crab one afternoon in a pool, / An old crab with barnacles on his back, / Gripped the end of a stick which I held him” (43–45). The scene could as well be in the opening chapter of Woolf's Jacob's Room, where young Jacob climbs a rock “rough with crinkled limpet shells and sparely strewn with locks of dry sea wood” to retrieve “an opal-shelled crab” moving “on weakly legs on the sandy bottom” ( JR 9). A list of lost natural images figures into Eliot's renunciations of “Ash Wednesday,” many from his early seascape. He records “the lost lilac and the lost sea voices,” as well as “the bent golden-rod,” and “the cry of quail and the whirling plover” (196, 198, 200). “Dry Salvages” of The Four Quartets notes a loss to evolution, as the sea tosses “its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale's backbone” (18–19) on the beaches and offers “for our curiosity / The more delicate algae and the sea anemone” in seaside pools (20–21).

The pattern of lost nature takes numerous forms in “The Waste Land,” a text well known to Woolf, who hand set it for publication by Hogarth Press. Pound cut many references to mariners and the sea by ejecting all but eight lines of part 4, “Death by Water.” In what remains, we learn that Phlebas the Phoenician had known the gulls and the sea swell, but we are also instructed to dread nature, as we attend to the denuding of Phlebas's bones by sea currents, and are warned that the same could await any “who turn the wheel and look windward” (320). In earlier drafts, Eliot tells a disastrous tale of Gloucester fishermen whose ship is blown to oblivion in the Arctic (a trajectory suggestive of Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic wreck, cited in his notes). The voyage had started with benevolent conditions for creatures: “Kingfisher weather,” the breeze so mild that “a porpoise snored upon the phosphorescent swell” (The Waste Land: Facsimile 55). When references to the sea return toward the end of the poem, it is the “hand expert with the sail and oar” and the heart…beating obedient / To controlling hands” (420–23) that approach the classi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 - Toward a Greening of Modernism
• 2 - Diversions of Darwin and Natural History
• 3 - Limits of the Garden as Cultured Space
• 4 - The Art of Landscape, the Politics of Place
• 5 - Crossing the Species Barrier
• 6 - Virginia Woolf and Ideas of Environmental Holism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index