How Virginia Woolf Utilised Modernist Aesthetics to Write About War
Harley Carnell
Critical Essay
Along with T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf stands as one of the most important and impactful proponents of what has subsequently been termed Modernism. Her deployment of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness to subvert traditional narrative styles, her exploration of queer characters, and her unflinching depiction of mental illness, made her a formative author who remains relevant today.
These topics, along with study of Woolf’s letters and diary, can be argued to somewhat subsume what I believe to be another important consideration of her work: how she depicted war. To be clear, scholars have noted the impact of war in Woolf’s work. As Mark Hussey notes:
To read Virginia Woolf’s fiction intelligently, the reader must recognize fully the extent to which war shaped her vision and the reasons why it had such an impact. (14)
However, when one thinks of authors associated with the First World War, names such as Wilfried Owen, Sigfried Sassoon et al probably come more readily to mind. A key distinction between these and Woolf is the manner in which they depicted war. Owen and Sassoon, who both fought in WWI, deftly evocate the brutal and terrifying horrors of war drawing on personal experience. Works such as theirs, or later ones including the satirical Johnny Got His Gun (1939), tend to be seen as more exemplary of war literature in their encapsulation of the horrors of war. In her fiction, Woolf does not attempt to emulate this style of war writing. However, as I will argue, her utilisation of Modernist tropes and forms effect some of the most startling and impactful war literature of the 20th Century.
Virginia Woolf lived through the entirety of the First World War and the first two years of the Second (she killed herself in 1941). Throughout her life, she was closely acquainted with many anti-war activists, some of whom would be imprisoned for their pacifism,1 including her sister Vanessa and her husband Clive Bell, her brother Adrian Stephen, the writer Lytton Strachey, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Much of her work is focussed either directly or indirectly on war, and her book Three Guineas is a strident and vociferous work of pacifism. As with any suicide, the reasons behind Virginia Woolf’s are multifaceted and variegated. But living at a time of war, when two of her London houses were bombed (Lee 743), friends of hers were killed,2 and attacks even reached out into her countryside retreat in Rodmell, means that the Second World War was at the very least contributory to her taking her own life. Virginia and Leonard Woolf, aware that they were on a Gestapo arrest list, had made plans for a joint suicide in the event of a Nazi invasion of Britain (Lee 730). In her diary entry for 6 June 1940, Woolf wrote how: ‘capitulation [of London] will mean all Jews to be given up. Concentration camps. So to our garage.’ (Diary, 336). Her diary is also replete with her belief that death is imminent, writing how ‘we live without a future’ (364) and, on an entry dated 26 June 1940, ‘I can’t conceive there will be a 27 June 1941’ (337).3
Jacob’s Room is, in a sense, a war book. Its titular character dies in World War I. His surname, Flanders, is a clear reference to Flanders Fields, at once a collective term for the location of numerous notable battles in World War I, and the staple war poem ‘In Flanders Fields.’ Yet if one actually reads Jacob’s Room, the War does not appear until very late in the book, and is referenced almost obliquely. Jacob’s death in the War occupies barely a page. It is, admittedly, a very poignant rendering. The last line of the novel sees his mother holding a pair of his shoes, asking ‘what am I to do with these?’ (155), while his friend Richard Bonamy, glaring at a detritus of papers on his desk asks, ‘What did he expect? Did he think he would come back?’ (ibid.) However, for a novel called Jacob’s Room in which the eponymous character is killed in the War, one would expect this to occupy more than a few pages.
This was not an accident. Early in the novel, the narrator talks of a paper on Jacob’s desk at university, entitled ‘Does History Consist of the Biographies of Great Men?’ (31) This is a question that preoccupied Woolf throughout the entirety of her life. In her feminist staple A Room of One’s Own (1929)Woolf talks of how ‘biography [is] too much about great men’ (164). In To the Lighthouse (1927), Mr Ramsay wonders: ‘If Shakespeare had never existed(…)would the world have differed much from what it is to-day? Does the progress of civilisation depend upon great men?’ (48)
That Woolf should be concerned with the topic was perhaps inevitable. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was not only a candidate for being a ‘Great Man,’ but was intimately concerned with the topic himself. His magnum opus was his editing of the seminal (and extant) Dictionary of National Biography (between 1885-91), in which the lives of many ‘Great Men’ were documented. While Virginia Woolf’s complicated relationship with her father is beyond the scope of this essay, it is clear that at his worst moments he could be domineering, boorish, and outright terrifying. In To The Lighthouse, the artist Lily Briscoe is literally unable to paint when the patriarch, Mr Ramsay, is standing over her: ‘But with Mr Ramsay bearing down on her, she could do nothing(…)She could not paint’ (162). Early in the novel, when he tells his children that they cannot go to the lighthouse, his son James thinks how if he had a knife, he ‘would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then(…)Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr Ramsay incited in his children by his mere presence(…)’ (8) Woolf’s sister, Vanessa, after saying how clearly she depicted their mother (as Mrs Ramsay) in the novel, said how ‘you have given father too as clearly’ (cited in Lee, 480).
In Jacob’s Room, Woolf is careful to situate much of the action away from the titular Jacob. Frequently, his speech is reported, rather than spoken. We often read of him through other characters’ perspectives. One of these refers to him as ‘[t]he silent young man.’ (49) At one point, Bonamy does not even report what Jacob says, telling Clara, ‘[t]he insipidity of what was said needs no illustration(…)’ (133). Even in the passages pertaining to Jacob, we are often outside his immediate perspective. The aforementioned Great Men paper is described by the narrator as ‘an essay, no doubt’. Undoubtedly, this ‘no doubt’ induces doubt. Jacob would know whether the paper was or was not an essay; a narrator viewing his life from outside his perspective would not.
The Years (1937) also discusses the ‘Great Men’ topic, in this case the ‘psychology of great men.’ On both occasions, the discussion is interrupted and forgotten. Eleanor enters a room where Renny and Nicholas have been talking about it. After Renny explains this to her, Eleanor (who is worried about sounding ignorant) begins a stuttering response:
‘I was thinking about this war – I don’t feel this, but other people do…’ She stopped. He looked puzzled; probably she had misunderstood what he had said; she had not made her own meaning plain (246).
At this point, Nicholas returns, and the subject is dropped.
This was in the ‘1917’ section of the book. In the ‘Present Day’ section, set in the late 1930s, Eleanor’s cousin North is driving one day and thinking about a similar conversation he had had with Nicholas (who he knows as ‘Brown’):
They had been discussing dictators; Napoleon; the psychology of great men. But there was the green light – “GO!” (270)
Later, he begins to tell Sara about their discussion, but is interrupted by the arrival of a servant bursting into the room, and the topic is not resumed (276).
It is notable that among the various titles considered for The Years, one of them was Ordinary People (Diary, 234). This foregrounding of ordinary people and consequent backgrounding of ‘Great Men,’ then, is evident in both The Years4 and Jacob’s Room.
Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s third published novel, can be argued to be the progenitor of the more experimental works she would become synonymous with. In particular, this roving, not-quite omniscient narrator, with the rapid and vertiginous alterations of perspective that are most readily associated with her later works.
In ‘The Decline of Essay Writing,’ Woolf talks about how ‘if you have a monster like the British public to feed, you will try to tickle its palate in new ways; fresh and amusing shapes must be given to the old commodities’ (Selected Essays, 3). Then, in her essay ‘Modern Fiction,’ she espouses what by now is taken for granted to the point of being a truism, namely that real-life does not adhere to the linearity and coherence that can be found in more traditional narrative forms. She notes how:
The mind receives a myriad impressions —trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. (SE, 9)
And, thus:
if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. (Ibid)
In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67), which was incredibly formative and prescient in its execution, the titular narrator explains how his attempts to narrate his story in a ‘straight line’ have been hampered, and can be visualised more accurately as this:
Woolf’s similar subversion of the linearity and primacy of focus found in more traditional narratives, and the backgrounding of its eponymous male character, thus comprises her questioning of the idea of the Great Man.
Yet, of course, the plot of Jacob’s Room is a veritable spirit-level straight line compared to what was to follow. In preparation for the writing of To The Lighthouse, Woolf envisioned:
I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel.’ A new —— by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy? (Diary, 80)
This brings us on to the final consideration with regards to Jacob’s Room. WWI introduced mechanised slaughter, mass casualties, and impersonal killing through the use of technology, to a greater extent than had been seen before. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme alone, the British lost almost 20,000 men (Reynolds, 365). Impersonality became one of the hallmarks of the war. By relegating Jacob to the periphery of his own novel, his death being a mere aftershock, Woolf examines this in novel form. Much as almost 20,000 lives can be lost in the course of 24-hours, the hero of the modern novel can die, die suddenly, and his death can be of little consequence. This relegation of Jacob also helps Woolf to avoid a potential valorisation or glamourising of war that could occur if Jacob’s time in the war, or his death specifically, were more minutely examined.
In To The Lighthouse, there is a similar iteration of this. In terms of its structure, Woolf envisioned the book as ‘two blocks joined by a corridor’ (cited in Lee, 475). The blocks connote two dates, 10 years apart, regarding a family’s visit to the Isle of Skye in Scotland. The corridor in the middle, which can also be visualised as being like the middle of a capital ‘H’ is a small section called ‘Time Passes.’ Both the title and length of this section seem to imply a lack of importance. A series of parenthetical interludes are interspersed throughout this section, once more implying that these are of less concern. However, in one of these bracketed passages, we read:
A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among then Andrew Ramsay whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous. (145; my emphasis.)
This ‘or’ is significant; it contains ten whole lives (much as the small ‘Time Passes’ interlude comprises ten years). Yet if we are discussing a war in which thousands of people can die on a single day, then ‘or’ becomes pertinent. Although the narrator is omniscient enough to know Andrew’s death was ‘instantaneous,’ it is only able to round up or down to the actual figure of casualties. It simply cannot account for death on this magnitude. As with Jacob’s Room, To The Lighthouse highlights the impersonality of warfare by removing focus from the war itself, and reducing its human casualties to statistics.
In The Years and Mrs Dalloway, on the other hand, we have a more direct look at war. In the former, we read of how the war affected those who remained at home. Concerning itself with the Pargiter family, The Years spans from the late nineteenth century until the late 1930s. Each segment is numbered with a year (except for the last, which is merely called ‘Present Day.’) Although chronological, the years listed are not exhaustive: for instance, 1880 is followed by 1891, 1914 by 1917 etc. – a ‘curiously uneven time sequence,’ in Woolf’s own words (Diary, 193). Given this, and the advent of the War being by far the most significant event of 1914, one would assume that ‘1914’ would be almost entirely about the War. However, ‘1914’ actually takes place two months before WWI began, and does mention the war at all. That this was a deliberate eschewal on Woolf’s part is expected given both what I have discussed so far in this essay, but also within The Years itself. In ‘1891,’ the death of Irish Nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell is referenced a few times, but mostly superficially. This is in contrast to Joyce, who devotes an entire story – ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ – to it. In ‘1910,’ the death of Edward VII is briefly mentioned right at the end of the section. As with Jacob’s Room, Woolf is deliberately subverting the traditional preoccupation with Great Men and significant events.
However, in the sections following ‘1914,’ Woolf does address the war. Firstly, we have her depiction of North, Eleanor’s nephew, who is about to head to the frontlines in ‘1917.’ Sara views this with contempt, telling Eleanor how she had referred to his deployment to the ‘Royal Regiment of Rat-Catchers or something’ and proceeding to play the National Anthem with her knife and fork (249), which leads Nicholas to refer to her as ‘[p]rejudiced; narrow; unfair’ (250). Years later, North would still remember this, thinking of how Sara had ‘mocked him’ and how ‘they had quarrelled. And he had left her.’ (274)
In contrast, Eleanor had been sorry he was going to war, thinking how he was the ‘picture of a nice cricketing boy smoking a cigar on a terrace’ (250). However, unlike Jacob or Andrew Ramsay, North does survive. The same cannot be said for her brother, Charles, ‘a nice dull boy who had been killed.’ (293-4).
However, The Years mostly focuses on the Pargiters and other ‘ordinary people’ who remained in Britain during the war. That they are privileged by not being involved in the War is explicitly referenced. During an air raid, Eleanor says how ‘[t]he chances of being hit oneself are so small’ (253) and, when they emerge from shelter to hear gunfire, Renny says how ‘[t]hey’re only killing other people’ (266). At one point, Eleanor even thinks how she had ‘forgotten the raid!’ (262). This is echoed by Kitty who (in ‘Present Day’) said how she had ‘forgotten the war’ (367).
‘1918,’ set on Armistice Day (November 11) is not only the shortest section in the book (around two-and-a-half pages in my edition) but only briefly mentions the cessation of the war as Crosby, a former servant to the Pargiters, walks home – ‘The war was over – so somebody told her as she took her place in the queue at the grocer’s shop.’ (266). ‘1918’ is much more concerned with Crosby’s frustrations about her current employment situation, as she bemoans the ‘dirty brute’ and ‘foreigner’ she currently works for, as opposed to the ‘gentlefolk’ Pargiters she was previously employed by as well as the ‘hussies’ she is obliged to work alongside after one of the servant girls quit (265).5 To Crosby, the machinations of her working life are of far more relevance and importance than the War.
In Mrs Dalloway, on the other hand, we have a more direct and consequential engagement with the War. Mrs Dalloway concerns itself primarily with the titular Clarissa Dalloway, but also with Septimus Smith, who is suffering from ‘shell-shock’ following his experiences in WWI, in which he witnessed a close friend, Evans, blown up in front of him. As Aida Alayarian notes:
intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, sudden floods of emotions or images related to the traumatic event are common for people who have endured traumatic experiences. People may re-experience unwanted thoughts of the trauma and vivid images, as if the trauma were occurring again here and now. (100)
Trauma can also have a deleterious and vicious circle effect on sufferers, where:
as well as exaggerated responsiveness of the body’s physiological ‘stress response system’ to cues of the original trauma which are in and of themselves essentially harmless. (Bremner et al in Saigh and Bremner,104).
Finally, trauma victims often have reduced or decreased short-term memory capacity (see Golier et al in Yehuda, 54; 59). This all combines to create a horrific kind of living present for trauma victims, in which they are forced to experience the eternal return of what they endured. This is especially the case with repressed trauma, something which many soldiers after WWI experienced, not wanting to either burden their families/friends with their war experiences, or appear weak by doing so. Septimus, for instance, had ‘congratulated himself upon feeling very little’ when Evans had died (95).
In addition to paranoid symptoms, Septimus frequently sees Evans: ‘But no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not changed. I must tell the whole world, Septimus cried(…)’ (76). In one notable scene, he also believes he hears the birds singing to him in Greek, mirroring an incident which happened to Woolf herself during a breakdown in 1904 (Lee, 195). Septimus also has moments of perceived grandeur, which in some way also mirror Woolf, in the ecstatic moments of her bipolar disorder. Leonard Woolf noted how, during these periods, Virginia would become:
extremely excited; the mind raced; she talked volubly and, at the height of the attack, incoherently (cited in Lee, 178)
At one point, Septimus ecstatically exclaims, “I have been dead, and yet now am alive,” (75) which mimics Jesus in Revelation, who says: ‘I am he that liveth, and was dead: and, behold, I am alive for evermore (1.18). This comes after a long passage of almost eschatological self-aggrandisement. Septimus believes himself:
alone, called forth in advance of the mass of men to hear the truth, to learn the meaning, which now at last, after all the toils of civilisation – Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin, and now himself – was to be given whole to … ‘To whom?’ he asked aloud, ‘To the Prime Minister,’ the voices which rustled above his head replied (73-4)
During WWI, the understanding of psychology and trauma was hardly advanced, to say the least. Indeed, the term ‘shell-shock’ initially connoted a neurological rather than psychological affliction, as it was believed to be a biological problem occurring to soldiers who had been proximal to exploding shells. (Schlenger et al in Saigh et al, 70). Due to the sheer number of ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers, many of those who treated them were not even doctors of the mind or nerves (Loughran, 80). Soldiers who declared themselves (or were declared) unfit to fight due to trauma were viewed sceptically, with a persistent suspicion that they were malingering. Many soldiers were court-martialled and executed, their conduct considered tantamount to desertion (Lees, 40-41). One soldier, a Private Harry Farr, was executed despite having been in a military hospital for five months (ibid, 42-3). The indeterminacy regarding precisely what ‘shell-shock’ meant led many to fear it was too broad and all-encompassing a term that comprised ‘an attractive exit-ticket’ for malingerers, ‘dirty sneaks’ and ‘blameworthy weaklings,’ looking to escape the war (Barnham, 18). Despite there being a documented history of soldiers feigning or causing physical injuries to avoid duty (Feldman and Yates, 9-10), and this hardly leading people to assume physical injuries were feigned, people’s natural bias against mental illness led to them being automatically suspicious of it.
Shell-shocked soldiers returning home could often expect to receive this reaction. As Barnham notes:
Without bandages, scars or missing limbs, the shell shock casualty could not lay claim properly to a wound; without the prestige of a wound, he was under suspicion. In private his manhood could be doubted, in public his patriotism might be questioned. (52)
As Septimus’s wife, Rezia, thinks, after Septimus threatens to kill himself:
And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now. (25)
Later, when she witnesses Septimus crying, she thinks how it was:
the most dreadful thing of all, to see a man like Septimus, who had fought, who was brave, crying. (154)
Rezia was the fictional counterpart of many wives and family members who had to deal with soldiers who were released home having received little or no treatment, due to a lack of both understanding of psychological conditions and a shortage of beds/resources. As harsh as the above may sound, Woolf does not portray Rezia as uncaring. Rather, she is simply unequipped to cope with Septimus. Among the most tragic incidents of the novel comes moments before Septimus’s suicide, as Septimus and Rezia have fun with each other and joke around, causing Rezia to think that: ‘not for weeks had they laughed like this together.’ (157)
It is for Septimus’s doctors – Holmes and Bradshaw – that Woolf reserves scorn. Despite being intimately acquainted with Septimus’s suffering, Holmes, who is depicted as something of a blithering idiot, is completely unreceptive. He tells Rezia that there was ‘nothing whatever seriously the matter with [Septimus] but was just a little out of sorts.’ (27). He remarks to Septimus that it will do him good to get a hobby: ‘for did he not owe his excellent health(…)to the fact that he could always switch off from his patients on to old furniture’ (100). Of course, it is important that doctors are able to detach from patients to an extent, in order to preserve both their own mental health and sustain their performance level. As neurosurgeon Henry Marsh has pointed out: ‘You can’t operate if you’re a nervous wreck all the time’ (in Kale). Dr Holmes, however, is presented as if he is switching off while actually treating Septimus. He continually dismisses Septimus’s suffering, suggesting that he is merely ‘in a bit of a funk’ (100).
Bradshaw is depicted more sympathetically towards Septimus. On hearing about Dr Holmes, he scorns him, and GPs generally, as it ‘took half his time to undo their blunders. Some were irreparable.’ (105) Bradshaw is certainly more well-meaning than Holmes, however he is ultimately unable to understand Septimus. His suggestion that Septimus take a rest cure in a country house is what ultimately convinces Septimus to kill himself (164). When he dies, Dr Holmes remarks scornfully, ‘the coward!’ (ibid)
Given the examples of how shellshocked soldiers were treated above, we can in no way say that Woolf’s depiction of either doctor is anachronistic. If anything, she may have shown a bit of restraint. Bradshaw specifically is also inspired by Woolf’s own experience of a rest cure. Administered by the almost Dickensianly-named Dr Savage, Woolf underwent various rest cures, whose ineffectiveness and distressing nature convinced Leonard to only have her treated at home subsequently (Lee 182-3).6
Woolf thus skilfully utilises her own mental illness and transmogrifies it into the experience of a returning soldier. During the War, Septimus had ‘served with the greatest distinction’ and had been promoted (105). Now, he is a complete wreck of a man, utterly destroyed by the war and discarded by the country that he was sent to fight for. In Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which also concerns itself with WWI, the narrator says:
I sat up straight and as I did so something inside my head moved like the weight on a doll’s eyes and hit me inside in back of my eyeballs. My legs felt warm and wet and my shows were wet and warm inside. I know I was hit and I leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee was not there. My hand went in and my knee was down on my shin. (52)
This, and the more evocative passages of a Wilfred Owen, Sigfried Sassoon etc. are rightly lauded as deftly evincing the physical and bodily horrors of war. To my mind, Mrs Dalloway should be similarly vaunted as explicating the psychological horrors of war.
With Mrs Dalloway, we have the closest and most direct depiction of war Woolf has yet evinced. However, even this is somewhat subversive. Rather than, say, an officer or a general, or a returning valorous soldier bravely recounting his exploits, we have someone lower down in the ranks, who is psychologically destroyed. Nowadays, with our understanding of conditions such as PTSD increasing, and our acceptance and encouragement of a masculinity that encompasses emotion and vulnerability, Septimus can be viewed as a hero. With Mrs Dalloway, Woolf deliberately draws Septimus as far away from the archetype of the traditional/stereotypical man and certainly the ‘Great Man.’ In doing so, she imbues him with a stark humanity which makes him so resonant.
In addition to the above, there is another crucial point to consider when discussing the War in Woolf’s work: her Feminism. To be clear, by this I do not mean Woolf’s Feminism more generally. That Woolf was a Feminist writer, and an incredibly formative Feminist writer at that, is obviously common knowledge. What I want to discuss is how her Feminism is intricately tied both to her writing style, and her utilisation of Modernist subversion of form.
In Woolf’s most enduring Feminist work, A Room of One’s Own, she talks about what she describes as the ‘male sentence’:
It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said. Indeed, since freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must have told enormously upon the writing of women. (114-5)
In Jacob’s Room, she parodies Bonamy,7 and his love of the male sentence:
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page of two. I like sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them. I like words to be hard – such were Bonamy’s views, and they won him the hostility of those whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can’t forbear a shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature. (122)
Woolf sought to subvert this. Throughout her life, she had a fondness for prose. In a diary entry on 15 February 1922, she said how in the past she might have wanted ‘mystery, romance, psychology, I suppose’ in her writing, but now she finds that: ‘more than anything you want beautiful prose’ (42). She says that ‘it would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men’ (A Room of One’s Own, 132)
This preoccupation with ‘male’ and ‘female’ writing came to be of great concern for later writers on Feminism and theoretical topics such as Poststructuralism. Hélène Cixous, in her seminal essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ begins talking about women writing about women, a subject that also concerns Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf celebrated the increase in women writing about women, criticising the absurdity that, once, the near-entirety of writing about women was done by men. Cixous writes:
And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great—that is, for “great men”; and it’s “silly.” (876)
It is in this essay that Cixous would coin the term ‘ècriture feminine’ (women’s writing). Écriture feminine, to be clear, is not merely or simply writing by women. As Cixous says, ‘There are some men (all too few) who aren’t afraid of femininity’ (885). One of the most significant contributors to ècriture feminine was the Poststructuralist Jacques Derrida, for instance, who coined the term phallologocentrism (an extension of the term ‘phallocentrism,’ where the latter refers to the proliferation of male concerns in society and the former in language specifically). Derrida would write how:
Because woman is (her own) writing, style must return to her. In other words, it could be said that if style were a man (much as the penis, according to Freud is the « normal prototype of fetishes »), then writing would be a woman. (57)
Cixous cites the French author Jean Genet, in particular his novel Pompes Funèbres (Funeral Rites, 1949), as an exemplar of ècriture feminine. Concomitantly, a female author would not definitionally or necessarily be engaging in ècriture feminine. This is because ècriture feminine is to do with stylistics. A female author attempting to imitate, say, the staccato and declarative prose of a Hemingway, would not be engaging in ècriture feminine even though they happened to be a woman. Cixous asserts that women should:
write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes (886)
and that by ‘sweeping away syntax, breaking that famous thread (just a tiny little thread, they say) which acts for men as a surrogate umbilical cord’ (ibid) they can thus achieve the ‘feminine text’ which ‘cannot fail to be more than subversive.’ (888)
Although Cixous does not cite Woolf in her essay, we can locate frequent iterations of ècriture feminine in her work. Woolf’s method of writing, in what has subsequently tended to be grouped under the nomenclature ‘stream of consciousness,’ is deliberately subversive of previous modes of narrative style. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf writes how:
if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. Clearly, the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives. (146)
One does not view Woolf’s novels so much ‘through a glass darkly’8 as through a glass refracted. Instead of a singular perspective, there is a multiplicity of them. In Mrs Dalloway, for example, there is an almost filmic quality to the oscillating alterations of perspective, frequently delineated with merely a line break.9
In To The Lighthouse, we read of Lily Briscoe, a painter, who we can take as an obvious acolyte for Woolf.10 Throughout the novel, Lily is haunted by the words of Charles Tansley: ‘Women can’t paint; women can’t write.’ (54). What Lily paints is meant to be exemplary of contemporary art forms, which were eschewing more realist forms of depiction. When Mr Banks looks at her painting and asks what the ‘purple triangular shape’ on it is (58), he contests that it can be a likeness of the Ramsay family. Lily disagrees, saying that she had ‘made no attempt at likeness’ and that ‘There were other senses, too, in which one might reverence them [the Ramsays]. By a shadow here and a light there, for instance.’ (58-9) In the latter third of the book, Lily finds herself literally unable to paint as Mr Ramsay stands over her. Lily is only able to truly free herself when she is no longer interested in what anyone (although, primarily, men) think about her work:
Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was – her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (225-6)
Similarly, Woolf, by ignoring the (mainly male) critics of her work, was thus able to achieve a writing that was truly her own, and truly female. That Woolf was able to publish her own works through her and Leonard’s Hogarth Press was significant in this. As Woolf put it, she was ‘the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series and editors.’ (Diary, 83)
Throughout her novels, Woolf’s foregrounding of female characters, deployment of female writing, removal of perspective from male characters and, in Septimus, her preoccupation with men who subvert traditional notions of ‘valour’ and ‘masculinity’ are key to her usurpation of the Great Men trope.
With regards to Western literature, the prototypical Great Man would be Shakespeare. In one of the most affecting passages in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf creates her celebrated ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’ thought experiment.
She imagines Shakespeare having an equally talented sister, who, due to it being ‘impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare,’ (70) would never have had his success. Although as capable of producing Shakespeare’s work, she was ‘not sent to school’ (ibid.) and so did not achieve what he did. Woolf uses this putative sister as a stand in for the many women who, given the opportunity, could have written the works, composed the sonnets, made the scientific discoveries etc., that led to the histories and biographies being peopled by Great Men. This serves as an effective counter to any proponent of the idea of the Great Man, who might point to the works of the Great Men and ask its detractors to despair. Woolf could simply point to the empty space above the epitaph, the potential in the eroded statue, where the Great Women could have created.
Woolf famously noted that ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed.’ (Selected Essays, 38) This incredibly prescient presentiment refers, specifically, to an exhibition of Post-impressionist art in London, with ‘Post-impressionism’ being a coinage of her friend, Roger Fry. However, in the subsequent decades, in art and literature, a usurpation of form and language were effected. As we can see from the date, this predated WWI. Certainly, this change in human character cannot be said to have occurred immediately, and change could be argued to have been gestating before the War. Darwinian evolution undermined religious authority. Works such as Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil questioned Western notions of morality.11 A destabilisation of anthropocentrism and the importance of humanity was brought about by discoveries in astronomy and, later, quantum mechanics. There was also increased licentiousness with regards to language, and literary and artistic depictions of things such as sex and bodily functions. The apotheosis of this would, of course, be James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which led Woolf to talk of his ‘indecency’ (Essays, 52). In Mrs Dalloway, Peter Walsh – who has spent ten years away in India – is disheartened to read how there was a man ‘writing quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies about water-closets. That you couldn’t have done ten years ago’ (78). In Moments of Being, discussing a moment where Lytton Strachey noticed a white stain on Woolf’s sister Vanessa’s dress and asked if it was semen, Woolf said how they all burst out laughing:
With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down(…)Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips. We discussed copulation with the same openness that we had discussed the nature of good. (195-6)
She contrasts this with previously having blushed (‘in 1908 or 9’) when passing Clive Bell (her brother-in-law) on the train to use the toilet, and how she ‘never dreamt of asking Vanessa to tell me what happened on her wedding night.’ (196)
However, The War, with its mechanised and mass slaughter, constituted something of a nuclear explosion of all these existing reactions. In addition to all the horror of the War, the public loss of faith in institutions and leaders was seismic. The phrase ‘lions led by donkeys’ was coined to describe the perceived ineptitude of army officers sending countless young men to their deaths. This is alluded to in To The Lighthouse, where Mr Ramsay repeatedly refrains ‘someone blundered.’ The line is taken from Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854). The poem lamented the failures of the Crimean War, but here Woolf reappropriates it for the feeling of disillusionment felt in Post War Britain. In A Room of One’s Own, she speaks of the ‘shock’ of people seeing ‘the faces of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked – German, English, French – so stupid.’ (23)
In this time where, to appropriate Poe, people’s ‘hearts were volcanic’ (Poe, 62), Woolf wrote how:
that the Earth is 3,000,000,000 [sic] years; that human life lasts but a second(…)that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bounds of union seem broken; it is in this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers now have to exist(…) [Selected Essays, 75]12
In the arts, it was felt familiar forms were no longer viable mechanisms to create in. Vincent Sherry notes:
Familiarity, now, the instrumental rationality of language has collapsed into some profounder apprehension of the indistinguishable, the unreasonable, the unspeakable – under the irresistible pressure that recent history has placed on the standards and practices of older rationalistic grammar.’ (286)
Lily’s triangle, and its attempt to depict the Ramsays in a novel manner, was indicative of how Modernists attempted to use subversive forms to question and problematise the concept of reality itself. In his introductory book, Problems of Philosophy (1912), Betrand Russell began by asking if ‘there is any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?’ (1) He then chooses the example of a table, and points out how even this seemingly innocuous object presents challenges: it will look different depending on the angle it is seen at; will appear different depending on the lighting; cannot be seen at all by visually impaired people; and, even if none of this was the case, the seemingly smooth surface of the table becomes bumpy and rigid when seen under a microscope. Russell concludes:
Thus it becomes evident that the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what we immediately experience by sight or touch or hearing. The real table, if there is one at all, is not immediately known to us(…) [2-4]
Woolf spoke of:
a variety of styles and subjects: for after all, that is my temperament, I think, to be very little persuaded of the truth of anything(..) [Diary, 137]
Derrida, responding to the opening of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, in which he posits that truth is a woman, says how:
the credulous and dogmatic philosopher who believes in the truth that is woman, who believes in truth just as he believes in woman, this philosopher has understood nothing. He has understood nothing of truth, nor anything of woman. Because, indeed, if woman is truth, she at least knows that there is no truth, that truth has no place here and that no one has a place for truth. And she is woman precisely because she herself does not believe in truth itself, because she does not believe in what she is, in what she is believed to be, in what she thus is not. (53)
We can situate Woolf’s more oblique depiction of War in her Modernist concerns. However, there is also a strong sense in which it can be located in her Feminism. In her essay ‘Thoughts on Peace During an Air Raid,’ Woolf states that ‘Mental fight means going against the current, not with it.’ (Selected Essays, 271). A running theme of Woolf’s non-fiction about the War was that women were excluded from it. In Three Guineas, Woolf points out that:
both the Army and the Navy are closed to our sex. We are not allowed to fight. Nor again are we allowed to be members of the Stock Exchange. Thus we can use neither the pressure of force nor the pressure of money. (11)
Being disenfranchised, Woolf explains, a woman might question a soldier’s assertion that he is fighting for their country when ‘What does our country mean to me an outsider?” (98) and:
She will find that she has no good reason to ask her brother to fight on her behalf to protect “our” country. “Our country,’” she will say, “throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. (99)
This all links back to Woolf’s fiction. In A Room of One’s Own, she laments how, when it comes to fiction:
it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial”. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction.
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. (110-11)
Then, relating back to the discussion of reality/realism, Woolf says how:
Though we [women] see the same world, we see it through different eyes [than men]. (Three Guineas, 16).
And this, to my mind, constitutes the most fascinating iteration of Woolf’s engagement with war: how even when she does not explicitly depict it, this itself is a conscious and subversive rendering of the War in her fiction.
Therefore, I hope that seminal war writer can be added to the many associations that are brought up when discussing one of the 20th Century’s most important authors.
Endnotes
- Much of Three Guineas explicates Woolf’s theory that war is symptomatic of male aggression. Ironically, then, even this, her book which most explicitly addresses war, gets subsumed more generally into Feminist considerations of her work.
↩︎ - As Rezia says in Mrs Dalloway, ‘[e]very one has friends who were killed in the war’. (72)
↩︎ - A remark that takes on an added poignancy as Woolf would kill herself on 28 March 1941.
↩︎ - Contrast with, say, Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov commits a murder as a philosophical enquiry into whether there are certain great men whose actions can be excused for a greater purpose. This forms the crux of the entire novel. This is alluded to by Woolf as one of the great men whose psychology is discussed in The Years is Napoleon, who also preoccupies Raskolnikov.
↩︎ - While Crosby is clearly meant to be portrayed as bigoted here, it is interesting that Woolf herself lamented the availability of ‘good’ servants after the War, as young women became more aware of concerns such as workers’ rights and better pay (Lee 354), and Woolf said how one of the worst things about the air raids was having to make conversation with the servants all night (ibid., 356).
↩︎ - Arguably the most effective polemic against rest cures comes from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s seminal feminist/weird text ‘The Yellow-Wallpaper’ (1892), which was inspired by her time under the ‘care’ of Dr Silas Weir Mitchell. Interestingly, it was this same rest cure that Dr Savage administered to Woolf.
↩︎ - Lytton Strachey, who as we have seen earlier was critical of Mrs Dalloway, by comparison loved Jacob’s Room (‘the technique of the narrative is astonishing’ [Strachey, 2005]) and said ‘I am such a Bonamy.’ (Holroyd, 523)
↩︎ - 1 Corinthians 13.12
↩︎ - This is passim throughout Mrs Dalloway. However, the most notable example would be in the skywriting passage towards the beginning of the novel, 21ff
↩︎ - As Carol Shields, in her novel Unless, perceptively notes: ‘there are novelists who go to the trouble of cloaking their heroes in loose crossover garments, turning them into painters or architects, but no one’s fooled.’ (208)
↩︎ - And, of course, Nietsche’s famous sentiment that Gott ist Tot ‘God is dead’ also occurred in an environment of the questioning of religion. In To The Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay wonders ‘How could any lord have made this world?’ (71), and Lily Briscoe is openly atheist.
↩︎ - In The Years, we see a mirror of this, where Peggy thinks: ‘There were a row of chimney-pots against the sky. Then the stars. Inscrutable, eternal, indifferent(…)’ (314)
↩︎
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Harley Carnell lives and writes in London, England. His fiction has been published in Riptide Journal, Confrontation, Litro and Sarasvati, among others. His critical work has appeared in the Lovecraft Annual, Gamut and Aurealis. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. He can be found at harleycarnell.com.
Photo Credit: Giulio R.M. Maffii was born in Florence, Italy. His studies are dedicated to poetry (linear-experimental-visual) and its diffusion. He has published in many international magazines also as a visual artist. He collaborates with “Bubamara Teatro” Theatre Company. He teaches at the University of Florence. He plays with photos and collages.
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