Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
| Born into intellectual and social aristocracy. Father, Leslie Stephen
an editor and historian. Mother a known and admired beauty, often used
as a model for important Pre-Raphaelite painters. Not sent to school, in accordance with the custom of the times. Received a splendid education (autodidact) but remained resentful and offended on this account. Mother died when she was young, prompting her first nervous breakdown. Virginia took over supervision of the affairs of the household (she was thirteen years old at the time. Married Leonard Woolf—an unconventional choice for her. Anti-imperialist, Jew, free-thinker. From their house in Bloomsbury they began a circle that was hugely influential on British arts and letters and architecture for years. With a flexible notion of gender preferences the Bloomsbury group “lived in squares, but loved in triangles.” Leonard and Virginia’s press, Hogarth Publishers, non-fiction and fiction, including the first English translations of Freud. Virginia becomes more and more anxious about her own sanity as WWII approaches, final destiny at the bottom of the river in a coat weighed with stones. |
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A Room of One’s Own
Chapter Two
One may see this as hybrid literature—part
essay, part autobiography, part fiction. One aspect that stands out is that
it is structured around several days of investigations made by the narrator
(Woolf). In the first chapter, she visits the seat of British learning (to
which she was denied access, unlike her brother). Calls this Oxbridge (combining
Oxford and Cambridge). She experiences such things as being shooed off the
lawns, being denied access to the libraries in the men’s college, and
being able to compare the mealplan at the men’s college with the woman’s.
It is in this chapter one finds the famous lines “One cannot think well,
love well, or sleep well if one has not dined well.”
Our chapters find her returned to London (60
miles from Oxford or Cambridge, which are about 84 miles apart.) Enters the
British Museum to seek answers to a number of questions—rationalizing
that the Museum is sure to be the repository of truth. Notice the atmosphere
evoked by the city (coal chutes, corded boxes of immigrant family possessions)
and the great metaphor for the dome of the museum (the huge bald forehead).
Student next to her extracting pure nuggets
of the essential ore every ten minutes or so.
Her one question becomes 50 questions . . .
Some great random notes with conflicting thoughts
on women from great men, then the speculation on the portrait of Prof. Von
X, who is another authority on women. That he is angry is evident—why
is the question. Infidelity? Cradle trauma (being laughed at by a pretty girl).
These speculations on anger make her conclude
that the books on women were worthless, because “they had been written
in the red light of emotion rather than in the white light of truth.
The newspaper clearly shows who it is that is
in control of the world in all its many aspects. “he will decide if
the hair on the meat-ax is human . . .”
The idea that self-confidence is gained in proportion
of one’s superiority to another. This is when the metaphor of the woman
as looking glass, reflecting their men at twice their size, is offered. “Mirrors
are essential to all violent and heroic action” (1985). In these moments—when
she picks up the newspaper, or pays the bill, and a new kind of notion appears
that furthers the argument already begun, we see the genius of an argument
that follows like the path of a woman on her daily rounds. Here the subject
of money accompanies the paying of the bill.
For third chapter, students are encouraged to
chart their own course, remembering the movements through meditations on history
and on the possibilities envisioned in the speculations on Shakespeare’s
sister.
“The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection”
--The first sentence makes the injunction. Why should people
not leave mirrors? (Like the other 2 objects, could tell things that are desired
to be hidden). The first paragraph sets up the mirror as the frame for a kind
of portrait.
The atmosphere contributes to the final culmination of the meditation. 2nd
paragraph sets the narrator up as the observer of the secret lives of animals—the
naturalist. But it is things that move, animated by light and breeze and shadow.
The grasslands gives way to the ocean which is compared in its “passions
and rages and envies and sorrows to the human being.
3rd paragraph compares outside and inside. Inside—all dynamics of change.
Outside—stasis—fixed in a unchanging light and outside of sound.
Having set the mood, the story gives way to its major theme—the meditation
on Isabella Tyson. For the narrator, “it was strange that after knowing
her all these years one could not say what the truth about Isabella was”
(184). So this unnamed and unseen narrator is driven to construct a portrait
(in the mirror) of Isabella. This portrait is composed through:
1. The mood in which the narrator finds herself. Seems like the modernist
realm where shadow and depth, the unseen elements are as important in the
composition as the “facts.”
2. The imagination. Takes what is known and then projects its own desires,
thereby making a kind of romantic picture of the subject of the narration.
3. The presentation of Isabella (gradually) in the mirror.
The hidden world of letters (personal correspondence) supposed to conceal
a hidden world of romance and intrigue. Here the will of the narrator to preserve
this ideal survives the factthat the narrator hadn’t married: “Judging
from the mask-like indifference of her face, she had gone through twenty times
more of passion and experience than those whose loves are trumpeted forth
for all the world to hear.” An ironic conclusion, and the reader who
is not pulled into the same idealizing desire might have another interpretation
of the “mask.”
And more, real letters come in a moment of change in even this implacable
mirror. A herald of the function of modern, abstract, or expressionist art?
Allows more misunderstanding, as the daily post is seen as marble tablets
with the air of truth: “if one could read them, one would know everything
there was to know about Isabella, yes, and about life, too."
To prize her open with the imagination as tool.
And in reading her thoughts as she prunes, on 185, one imagines that yes,
these were her thoughts, but also the mundane things she talked about at dinner.
What is wanted is the deeper, eternal innermost thoughts. Echoes in this section
of the kinds of meditations done by Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” (pp.22-28).
Finally, here she comes, out of the imagination and into the mirror in the
flesh. Note that in perspective she is altered, not clear, verified by degrees.
But what occurs (perhaps because the narrator is unseen yet entirely focused
on the scene at hand: the woman is revealed outside of her masque, the image
of her presented by the environment she has created, etc. and all of the tools
for the imagination are abandoned for the naked truth, and Isabella is left
as nothing, with nothing of substance.