Virginia Woolf / By Claudia Roth Pierpont
The Voyage
In
The literary critic Queenie Leavis, who had been born into the British lower
middle class and reared three children while writing and editing and teaching,
thought Virginia Woolf a preposterous representative of real women's lives:
"There is no reason to suppose Mrs. Woolf would know which end of the
cradle to stir." Yet no one was more aware of the price of unworldliness
than Virginia Woolf. Her imaginative voyages into the waveringly lighted depths
of "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse" were partly owed
to a freedom from the literal daily need of voyaging out - to the shop or the
office or even the nursery. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, believed that without
the aid of her inheritance his wife would probably not have written a novel at
all.
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Virginia Woolf |
For money guaranteed not just time but intellectual liberty. "I'm the
only woman in England free to write what I like," she exulted in her diary
in 1925, after the publication of "Mrs. Dalloway" by the Hogarth
Press, which she and Leonard had set up to free her from the demands of
publishers and editors. What she liked to write turned out to be, of course,
books that gave voice to much that had gone unheard in the previous history of
writing things down: the dartings and weavings of the human mind in the fleet
elaborations of thought itself.
"Mrs. Dalloway" is a finespun tribute to the complexities of
social interaction on a single day in London in 1923, ending with a shallow
society hostess's glittering party; it is also one of the boldest novels ever
written about the effects of World War I. Virginia Woolf was not without
politics or fierce worldly concerns. The diaries and letters spanning both
world wars are filled with bulletins and arguments, terrors of distant armies
and next-door bombs and the precariousness of the entire civilization of which
she knew herself to be a late, probably too exquisite bloom.
Her art is less direct. In her novels the resonance of great events sounds
from deep within individual lives. More than any other writer, Woolf has shown
us how the most far-off tragedies become a part of the way we think about our
daily expectations, our friends, the colors of a park, the weather, the
possibility of going on or the decision not to.
The old image of Virginia Woolf the snob has largely given way to various
loftier characterizations: Virginia Woolf the literary priestess, or the Queen
of ever-titillating Bloomsbury, or - most influentially - the vital feminist
whose requisite "room of her own" came to seem the very workshop in
which such books as "The Second Sex" and "The Feminine
Mystique" were later produced. Recently, however, Woolf has been granted a
new role in the all too modern female pantheon: the victim. The discovered
molestations of her childhood, the bouts of madness that led to her suicide,
seem now to commend rather than to qualify her right to speak for women. But
Woolf's personal example is in the strength and the steady professionalism that
kept her constantly at work - the overambitious failures as sweated over as the
lyric triumphs. For all her fragility as a woman, she was a writer of
gargantuan appetite, and she knew full well how much she intended to enclose in
her fine but prodigious, spreading, unbreakable webs. "Happier today than
I was yesterday," she wrote in her diary in January 1920, "having
this afternoon arrived at some idea of new form for a new novel. Suppose one
thing should open out of another ... only not for 10 pages but for 200 or so -
doesn't that give the looseness and lightness I want; doesn't that get closer
and yet keep form and speed, and enclose everything, everything?"
Claudia Roth Pierpont is a contributor to The New Yorker.
Copyright 1996 The New
York Times
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