Enter Stage Right: Encountering Women in Woolf Literature

Virginia Woolf’s novel, Between the Acts, printed posthumously, offers continued insights into Woolf’s ability to deftly manipulate spaces with words. She uses the movements of her characters to advance her literature and simultaneously provide a commentary on women as they negotiate through space. Author Helen Southworth addresses this phenomenon found in Woolf literature, particularly as women move from one place to another. “It entails a continual renegotiation of space. Breaking the threshold over and over again, Woolf’s woman marks the line separating inside and outside only to explode it moments later,” Southworth writes. (Ed. Snaith), p. 48. For example, Woolf carves this space for Lucy: “Lucy had just opened her lips to reply, and had laid her hand on the cross caressingly, when the gentlemen came in. She made her little chirruping sound of welcome. She shuffled her feet to clear a space. But in fact there was more space than was needed, and great hooded chairs.” (Woolf), p 215.   

To examine this further, let’s take a look at the power of the character of Lucy, who exerts her radiating presence to convince Giles to change his clothes. Later, she seems to drift ethereally from one place to another without the weight of the world on her shoulders. “He must change. And he came into the dining room looking like a cricketer, in flannel, wearing a blue coat with brass buttons, although he was enraged… Yet he changed. It was Aunt Lucy, waving her hand at him as he came in, who made him change.” (Woolf), p 46.

In another scene, she (Lucy) moves from one place to the next, while standing in the doorway threshold. “The door trembled and stood half open. That was Lucy’s way of coming in – as if she did not know what she would find. Really! It was her brother! And his dog! She seemed to see them for the first time. Was it that she had no body? Up in the clouds, like an air ball, her mind touched ground now and then with a shock of surprise. There was nothing in her to weight a man like Giles to the earth.” (Woolf), p 116.

Woolf’s strategic decision to position characters at the point of an intersection breaks open the literary opportunity for character development and plot. “Rather than positing two separate spaces, permitting distinctions such as inside/outside, yes/no to persist, Woolf focuses on intersections. These spaces are fraught with possibility,” Southworth states. (Ed. Snaith), p 49.  The author uses Lucy once again to reveal the presence “between two fluidities” that the character experienced following the play. “Lucy still gazed at the lily pond. ‘All gone,’ she murmured, ‘under the leaves.’ Scared by shadows passing, the fish had withdrawn. She gazed at the water. Perfunctorily she caressed her cross. But her eyes when water searching, looking for fish. The lilies were shutting; the red lily, the white lily, each on its plate of leaf. Above all, the air rushed; beneath was water. She stood between two fluidities, caressing her cross.” (Woolf), p 204.

Even with the eyes, Woolf personifies characters intermingling at intersections. For Isa, she witnessed the departure of individuals yet was still trapped by the conclusion “It was drifting away to join the other clouds; becoming invisible. Through the smoke Isa saw not the play, but the audience dispersing. Some drove; others cycles. A gate swung open. A car swept up the drive to the red villa in the cornfields. Low hanging boughs of acacia brushed the roof. (Woolf), p 213.

In Between the Acts, Woolf breaks the box of literary convention by interjecting a play into a novel, giving the reader a captivating experience. She further breaks the conventions of a “woman’s place” by showing the intersections of various spaces and showcasing how women navigate from various spheres and often poise themselves at an intersection.

Bibliography

Ed. Snaith, Anna and Michael H. Whitworth, ed. Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts . New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company , 1941.

 

 

The Subversive Act of Interjecting A Private Letter into the Public Sphere

Virginia Woolf smacks the conundrum of women confined to the private sphere in the face with the authorship of Three Guineas by unveiling the often concealed private letter and placing it into the public sphere.  Drafted in 1938, we see Woolf’s conclusions of a lifetime of social, economic and political observation come to form in this edgy format.  This work further allows us to explore the segregation between the public sphere and the private sphere.  

The  book is creatively crafted in response to a letter – the convention itself reveals the subversive nature of thrusting the private letter into the public sphere for appropriate dialogue and debate. “Now regarded as one of the most important letter writers of the twentieth century, Woolf spins and tortures the form of the semiprivate letter in Three Guineas to show how difficult it is for a woman citizen in England in 1936 and 1937 to reply to request for money for good causes. Her replies (our text) also follow the private letter into the public domain,” writes Jane Marcus in the 2005 introduction of Three Guineas. (Woolf), lvii.

Woolf points to the honorary treasurer’s letter soliciting money to rebuild her college as an opening to document Woolf’s perspectives on the role of women in professions, the power dynamics at work in society and the future for women. “She has been asking for some time; she is still asking it seems… History, biography and the daily paper between them make it difficult either to answer her letter or to dictate terms,” Woolf writes. (Woolf), p 39. Woolf indicates the incredulity of asking for money in the face of the war economy.  “Let us inform you: we are spending three hundred millions annually upon the army and navy; for, according to a letter that lies cheek by jowl and your own, there is a grave danger of way. How then can you seriously ask us to provide you with money with which to rebuild your college?” (Woolf), p 41

Woolf wrote this book in 1938 and despite the passage of 74 years of social, political and economic change, the issues remain the same. This awakening reveals a startling, and at times disheartening incidence of social misalignment, gender based power struggles and gender inequality in the workplace. Today, we still address the concepts of professions for women, the use of the word ‘feminist,’ equal pay for work, the ability of women to serve as religious leaders and other topics addressed by Woolf in Three Guineas. From first wave feminism to the third and fourth wave, society still grapples with these core struggles.

As a former journalist and communications studies instructor, I was interested in how Woolf observed the powerful role that men play in the world of publishing. She articulates their role as “gatekeepers” and simultaneously reveals how women are cast to the side, despite their views or the strength of their words.  “Then again although it is true we can write articles or send letters to the Press, the control of the Press – the decision what to print, what not to print – is entirely in the hands of your sex.” (Woolf), p 16.

Woolf tackles women’s role in exterior society head-on, with a sense of tongue-in-cheek humor, irony and confrontational language. She includes photography to advance her narrative responses. “The coloured photograph that we have been looking at presents some remarkable features, it is true, but it serves to remind us that there are many inner and secret chambers that we cannot enter. What real influence can we bring to bear upon law or business, religion or politics – we to whom the doors are still locked, or at best ajar, we who have neither capital nor force behind us? It seems as if our influence must stop short at that surface,” Woolf writes in Three Guineas. (Woolf), p28

Woolf underscores the gender- segregated spheres of the public and the private. “Sir I take you to mean that the world at present is divided into two services; one the public and the other the private. In one world the sons of educated men work as civil servants, judges, soldiers and are paid for that work; in the other world, the daughters of educated men work as wives, mothers, daughters – but are they not paid for that work?” (Woolf), p 66. Cloistered inside the home, Woolf resigns the fact that women will continue to support the perpetuation of patriarchy, including the war machine.  “…if they are going to be restricted to the education of the private house they are going, once more, to exert all influence both consciously and unconsciously in favor of war.” (Woolf), p 47.

As author Linda McDowell writes, women submit to a double bind that limits their forced independence on men limits their rights to freedom. “Thus women’s construction as dependent on men, both economically and morally, or as lesser beings – as fragile or in need of protection – reduces their rights to freedom. “(McDowell), p 150.  The simplest freedoms of moving into the public sphere and commanding the integrity of her body remained elusive in Woolf’s world.  “It was with a view toward marriage that her body was educated; a maid was provided for her; that the streets were shut to her; that the fields were shut to her – all this was forced upon her in order that she might preserve her body intact for her husband.” (Woolf), p 48.

We have repeatedly seen Woolf use the device of windows for women to engage in looking. While the peer out windows onto the landscape, they only view a sliver of information. Now, in Three Guineas, she advocates women to ‘light up’ the house. “Take this guinea then and use it, not to burn the house down, but to make its windows blaze. And let the daughters of uneducated women dance around the new house, the poor house, the house that stands in a narrow street where omnibuses pass and the street hawkers cry their wares, and let them sing ‘We have done with war! We have done with tyranny!” And their mothers will laugh from their graves, ‘It was for this that we suffered obloquy and contempt! Light up the windows for the new house, daughters! Let them blaze!” (Woolf), p 100.

Three Guineas offers viewers an encounter with the political mind of Virginia Woolf who tackles issues of her day head-on by taking up the female cause of women’s freedoms evidenced by access to education, access to professions, advocacy for political power and personal freedoms of movement. Despite the fact that more than 70 years have passed since this book’s appearance, women today still grapple with these issues. While women have logged advancements, including the enrollment of young women in universities, the broad issues linger, allowing us to take lessons from Woolf’s energetic advocacy.  

Bibliography

McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1999.

Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc. , 2005.

 

 

Following Fictional Females Through the Public and Private Spheres

This week, I continue a discussion of the role of women in the public and private spheres by examining Virginia Woolf’s The Years. Informed by references from spatial theorists such as Gaston Bachelard, Michel DeCerteau and feminist theoriest Linda McDowell, I connect concepts from these theorists exploring the private sphere, the public sphere and the realm of power.

Scholars of Virginia Woolf literature document the dichotomy of the public and private spheres found in her work. “Spatial separation of men and women is indicative of the separation along gender lines of opportunities for education, work and self-development. The Years charts changes in women’s sexual position and identity through their evolving relationship to the city, particularly through changes in their mobility, as confinement to and exclusion from certain places informs their knowledge about the world and their places in it,” Evans states. (Evans). P 113

To ground this discussion, I first point to Gaston Bachelard, the author of The Poetics of Space. For Bachelard, the home is a “large cradle” allowing young women to remain in the bosom of a protected cocoon to prevent them from harm. “Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.” (Bachelard). Bachelard further addresses the dialectics of outside and inside in “…from the point of view of geometrical expressions, the dialectics of outside and inside is supported by a reinforced geometrism, in which limits are barriers.” (Bachelard).

The women in the book know the barriers between the private sphere and the public sphere quite well. In an attempt to gaze into the public world, they gravitate to windows. Delia spends a lot of time looking out the window of the house, peering into the outside world, watching men navigate. “‘Don’t be caught looking,’ said Eleanor warningly. The young man ran up the steps into the house.; the door shut upon him and the cab drove away.  But for the moment the two girls stood at the window looking into the street.” (Woolf), p 18.  This quotation underscores the women simply looking at the young man, who has the freedom to navigate.    

Woolf casts a spotlight onto the dichotomy of public and private in her discussion of the Pargiter girls. While citing a draft copy of Woolf’s the Years, scholar Elizabeth Evans cites “Eleanor and Milly and Delia could not possibly go for a walk alone  …. To be seen alone in Picadilly was equivalent to walking up Abercorn Terrace in a dressing gown carrying a bath sponge.” (Evans), p 115

The demarcation between public and private has long been studies by feminist theorists and the connection to “danger” and the power balance is evidence by women “cordoned off” from social, economic and political happenings.  “Woolf’s narrator comments upon this scene, describing not only the danger to girls and women in the streets, but also the consequent need for their protection within the private sphere. The danger, outside, in other words, enables their cloistering at home,” according to Evans. (Evans), p 116

Further, through this removal and subsequent “imprisoning” in the home, a power dynamic emerges that denies the role of women in the public sphere. “Thus, women’s construction as dependent on men, both economically and morally, or as lesser beings – as fragile or in need of protection reduces their rights to freedom,” (McDowell), p 150.

Even a lightbeam had more freedom to pass between the cordoned off private world and the public realm.  “Woolf symbolically illustrates the permeability between public and private realms through the infiltration of noise and light from the outside world into the domestic space,” Evans writes, p 117.  We find this in the scene depicting the children eating dinner. “They ate in silence. The sun, judging from the changing lights on the glass of the Dutch cabinet, seemed to be going in and out. Sometimes a bowl shown deep blue; then became vivid. Lights rested furtively upon the furniture in the other room. Here was a pattern here was a bald patch. Somewhere there’s beauty, Delia thought, somewhere there’s freedom…” (Woolf), p 13.  This is reminiscent of Woolf’s description of the Ramsey house in To the Lighthouse. “Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall and for a moment darkened the pool in which the light reflected itself; or the birds, flying made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.” (Woolf, To The Lighthouse), p. 129.

For Woolf’s character Delia, the escape from the domestic realm came in the form of a trip to a funeral. “She glanced out the window again. Another man raised his hat – a tall man, a man in a frock coat, but she would not allow herself to think of Mr. Parnell until the funeral was over. At last they reached the cemetery.  As she took her place in the little group behind the coffin and walked up to the church, she was relieved to find that she was overcome by some generalized and solemn emotion ….. Delia, standing behind her father, noticed how he braced himself and squared his shoulders. ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ Pent up as she had been all these days in the half-lit house which smelt of flowers, the outspoken words filled her with glory,” Woolf writes.

The second half of Woolf’s years reveals the women taking a more aggressive approach to the public sphere. For Kitty’s ride in the rail car, I am reminded of Michel DeCerteau’s view on rails. Woolf writes, “There was a perpetual faint vibration. She seemed to be passing from one world to another; this was the moment of transition. She sat still for a moment; then undressed and paused with her hand on the blind,” (Woolf), p 256. DeCerteau places this in a perspective, “The windowpane is what allows us to see, and the rail allows us to move through. These are two complementary modes of separation.” (DeCerteau)

The characters in Woolf novels, continually try to step out of the domestic sphere. For example, in The Years,  Eleanor later finds her way onto the street: “The uproar, the confusion, the space of the Strand came upon her with a shock of relief. She felt herself expand. It was still daylight here; a rush, a stir, a turmoil of variegated life came racing towards her. It was as if something had broken loose – in her, in the world.” (Woolf), p 105 “She walked slowly along towards Trafalgar Square, holding the paper in her hand. Suddenly the whole scene froze into immobility. A man was joined to a pillar; a lion was joined to a many; they seemed stilled, connected, as if they would never move again. ” (Woolf), p107.

This is the power of the public sphere. The ability to engage in this realm, observe happenings and participate in the social, economic and political happenings of the day. While Woolf’s readers may not have exercised this freedom, with their minds they were able to traverse London streets, voyeuristically travel on trains and experience a freedom through Woolf’s fictional characters.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. The Orion Press, Inc. , 1964.

DeCerteau. The Practice of Everyday Life. 2011, n.d.

Evans, Elizabeth. "Woolf's Analysis of "The Outer and the Inner: A Spatial Analysis of The Years." Woolf and the Art of Exploration: Selected Papers from the Fifteenth International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Helen Southworth and Elisa Kay Sparks. Portland, OR: Clemson University Digital Press, 2005.

McDowell. Gender, Identity and Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Woolf, Virginia. The Years. Orlando: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

—. To The Lighthouse. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1981.

 

Footsteps on the Cityscape With Virginia Woolf

An avid walker, Virginia Woolf brings her passion for movement to the pages of her work. In  The Waves, originally published in 1931, we observe male and female characters navigating through urban places by walking. We seem them grapple with meaningful explanations for walking. From a philosophical perspective, this reminds us of our discussions regarding French sociologist and philosopher Michel DeCerteau and his movement imperative, the advent of the flaneur and the impact of this urban movement for women. Feminist theorist Linda McDowell offers further insights into the freedom factor for urban walking and allows us to better understand the liberation that occurs with Woolf’s female characters as they take to the city landscape.

DeCerteau believed that walking enabled the participant to gain a tactical view of the city, thus engaging in the happenings of urban life, deciphering stories and creating new memories. “He (DeCerteau) compares the act of walking to rhetoric, so that the appropriation of spaces can be seen as a kind of troping,  the official stories about movement in the city,” (Whitworth, 2007 ), p 16. Let’s examine strains of DeCerteau in The Waves by looking at a conversational exchange between characters Bernard and Neville. 

“It is true, and I know for a fact,” said Bernard, “as we walk down this avenue, that a King, riding, fell over a molehill here. But how strange it seems to set against the whirling abysses of infinite space, a little figure with a golden teapot on his head …. No, I try to recover, as we walk,  the sense of time, but with that streaming darkness in my eyes I have lost my grip,” Woolf writes in The Waves. (Woolf, 1931; 2005), p 167.  Neville disagrees.

“Unreasonably ridiculous,” said Neville, “as we walk, time comes back. A dog does it, prancing. The machine works …. I am beginning to be convinced, as we walk that fate of Europe is of immense importance, and, ridiculous as it seems, that all depends upon the battle of Blenheim. (Woolf, 1931; 2005), 167.     

While these male characters have a command of the public space and may dispute the role of time while walking, theorists such as McDowell posit an oppositional view for feminist theorists. She asserts that traversing over the public landscape may be considered a liberating factor for women. She writes, “…the public spaces of the city have been significant locations in women’s escape from male dominance and from the bourgeois norms of modern society.” (McDowell, 1999) p 49

In her fictional works, Woolf liberates women into the public realm via women walking in the public spaces of the city, as evidenced by Mrs. Dalloway’s excursion. Further, in the book Mrs. Dalloway, we also read about her daughter (Elizabeth) walking as part of a shopping journey. In The Waves, we see Jinny take to the streets of London to walk her dog and partake of daily living, giving her a sense of public freedom, unrestrained from her traditional roles.   Jinny becomes a female flaneur, a feminist act of modernity brought to us by Virginia Woolf.  “The quintessential figure of the modern metropolis, according to Baudelaire was that of the flaneur: the strolling observer, who gazed, but did not participate in the spectacular developments in the city. The flaneur was an anonymous figure in the urban crowd, invisible but all-seeing, a spectator who was, according to Frisby, “a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.” (McDowell, 1999), p154

While early female flaneurs were classified as “streetwalkers,” Woolf casts aside this discriminatory label and interjects her characters into the public space, allowing them to participate in the DeCerteanian mode of tactical observation.  “The latter group of women, commonly and accurately termed ‘streetwalkers’ were regarded as fallen women in the hypocritical sexual double standard of the Victorian era.  The very act of their appearance on the streets left the status of women open to interpretation and, often to unwanted sexual advances,” McDowell writes. (McDowell, 1999), p 154

For the Jinny character, who often used her beauty to command attention and wield power over others, the process of aging was characterized as one that put her “underground,” a subterranean experience “below” the freedom exerted by the flaneur.  “Here I stand,” said Jinny, “in the Tube station where everything that is desirable meets – Piccadilly SouthSide, Piccadilly North Side, Regent Street and the Haymarket. I stand for the moment under the pavement in the heart of London. Innumerable wheels rush and feet press just over my head. The great avenues of civilization meet here and strike this way and that. I am in the heart of life,” Jinny states. (Woolf, 1931; 2005), p 140. “But look, there is my body in the looking glass. How solitary, how shrunk, how aged! I am no longer young. I am no longer part of the procession, Jinny laments. (Woolf, 1931; 2005), p 142.  Her aging body, drives her away from the vitality, away from the “action,” and into a bystander role.

Footsteps taken across the urban and pastoral landscapes provide readers with flashes of insight into the use of public and private space, the dynamics associated with these various realms and the courage of Virginia Woolf to empower her female characters to walk out into the public space.   

Bibliography

McDowell, L. (1999). Gender, Identity and Place. Minneapolis: Polity Press .

Whitworth, E. A. (Ed.). (2007 ). Locating Woolf. New York : Palgrave Macmillian.

Woolf, V. (1931; 2005). The Waves. (e. Mark Hussey, Ed.) Orlando, Florida: Harcourt.

 

Lefebvre's Concepts of Social Space in the Waves: Observations on Susan and Bernard

As every society forms its own space, scholar Henri Lefebvre points to a “conceptual triad” comprised of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces, setting forth a method to understand how cultures use space.  (Lefebvre, 1991).

Readers of The Waves navigate through Virginia Woolf’s book find the characters grappling with the issues surrounding social space and their role situating themselves as they grow, adapt and change to fit altered circumstances of age, new relationships and worldly desires for marriage, career, independence and other dimensions.

For example, Woolf’s character Susan, who is the daughter of a clergyman, moves through the first portion of The Waves seeking happiness and defining herself in a traditional role. “I do not want as Jinny wants, to be admired. I do not want people, when I come in, to look up with admiration. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions,” Susan states in The Waves. (Woolf, 2006)

For Lefebvre, the spatial practices of individuals expresses the outcome of social patterns, including emotions, desires and actions.  “In reality, social space ‘incorporates’ social actions, the actions of subjects both individual and collective who are born and who dies, who suffer and who act.” (Lefebvre, 1991)

We find a demarcation of urban and pastoral space resonates for Susan, who seeks to retreat to the country life to raise her family in a traditional atmosphere, allowing her to embrace a traditional “mother” role. “I will not send my children to school nor spend a night all of my life in London. Here is the vast station everything echoes and booms hollowly. The light is like the yellow light under an awning. Jinny Lives here….The streets are laced together with telegraph wires. The houses are all glass, all festoons and glitter; now all front doors and lace curtains, all pillars and white steps,” Susan recounts in The Waves. (Woolf, 2006)

An individual’s choice – to live in the city, to live in the country, to travel abroad, to remain close to home – all represent the incorporation of value systems into an every changing atmosphere.  “The production of Space forms the keystone of the all-important ‘second phase’ of Lefebvre’s analysis of the urban that began in 1972. This later phase deals with social space itself as a national and ‘planetary expression’ of the modes of production….Lefebvre moved his analysis of ‘space’  from the old synchronic order of discourses “on” space …. To the manner in which understandings of geographical space, landscape and property are culturally and thereby have a history of change.” (Key Thinkers on Space and Place)

As a passenger on the train heading home, Susan recounts her departure from the city, and re-entry into the pastoral farm land, allowing her to re-unite with her father, an emotional moment for her. “Now I will let myself lean out the wind. The air rushes down my nose and throat – the cold air, the salt air with the smell of turnip fields in it. And there is my father with his back turned, talking to a farmer, I tremble. I cry. There is my father.”  (Woolf, 2006)

Sharing her delight of an early-morning walk through the farm, Susan states, “At this hour, this still early hour, I think I am the field. I am the barn, I am the trees; mine are the flocks of birds, and this young hare who leaps, at the last moment when I step up almost on him.” (Woolf, 2006)

Woolf’s character’s, and many fictional characters throughout literary works, find themselves struggling with questions of space and place. “But now let me ask myself the final question, as I sit over the grey fire, with its naked promontories of black coal, which of these people am I? It depends so much upon the room. When I say to myself, ‘Bernard,’ who comes?  A faithful, sardonic man, disillusioned, but not embittered. A man of no particular age or calling. Myself, merely.” (Woolf, 2006)

 “Social space thus remains the space of society, of social life. Man does not live by words alone; all subjects are situated in a space in which they must either recognize themselves or lose themselves, as space which they may both enjoy and modify,” Lefebvre states. (Lefebvre, 1991)

Bibliography

Key Thinkers on Space and Place. (n.d.).

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space . Malden: Blackwell.

Woolf, V. (2006). The Waves. Orlando: Harcourt.

 

The Poetics of Space in The Lady in the Looking Glass

Finding Bachelard’s Poetics of Space in Virginia Woolf's The Lady in the Looking Glass

The Lady in the Looking Glass by Virginia Woolf offers the reader a powerful analogy of the mind to a room, allowing us to derive key lessons from theorist Gaston Bachelard regarding the positioning of the individual in time and space.

Lady Isabella finds herself standing before a mirror in the drawing room pondering the life sequence that has passed before her as Woolf drills in on a spatial analogy. “Her mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately, spread their tails, pecked their way; and then their whole being was suffused, like the room again, with a cloud of some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret, and then she was full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters, like her cabinets,” Woolf writes in the Lady in the Looking Glass. (Woolf)

In his work, The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard offers additional insights into the conceptual yet hidden realm of the future in prose.  “With the theme of drawers, chests, locks and wardrobes, we shall resume contact with the unfathomable store of daydreams and intimacy,” Bachelard states. (Bachelard, 1964) For Isabella, this imagination translates into a fantasy world of love, passion, love lost that may contrast her life as a “spinster.” “….Isabella has known many people, had had many friends: and thus if one had the audacity to open and drawer and read her letters, one would find the traces of many agitations, of appointments to meet, of up bradings for not having met, long letters of intimacy and affection, violent letters of jealousy and reproach, terrible final words of parting – for all those interviews and assignations had led to nothing – that is she never married, and yet, 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.” (Woolf)

In the world of the lonely spinster Isabella, the cabinet offers a receptacle to hide the anguish of her solitude. “Wardrobes and their shelves, desks with their drawers and chests with false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life,” Bachelard states. “The pages inside those marble-looking envelopes must be cut deep and scored thick with meaning. Isabella would come in, and take them, one by one, very slowly, and open them, and read them carefully word by word, and then with a profound sigh of comprehension, as if she had seen the bottom of everything, she would tear the envelope to bits and tie the letters back together and lock the cabinet door in her determination to conceal what she did not wish to be known,” Woolf writes. (Woolf)

 As the drawer is pried open, so too is the soul of Isabella for the reader to view. “Every poet of furniture – even if he be a poet with a garret, and therefore has no furniture, knows that the inner space of an old wardrobe is deep. A wardrobe’s inner space is also intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody,” Bachelard writes. (Bachelard, 1964) “Isabella did not wish to be known – but she should no longer escape. It was absurd. It was monstrous. If she concealed so much and knew so much one must prize her open with the first tool that came to hand – the imagination,” Woolf writes. (Woolf)

For Bachelard, the concept of the drawer files away the creativity and quells vitality. “Concepts are drawers in which knowledge may be classified; they are also ready-made garments which do away with individuality of knowledge that has been experienced. The concept soon becomes lifeless thinking since, but definition, it is classified thinking,” Bachelard states. (Bachelard, 1964)

“To talk of ‘prizing her open’ as if she were an oyster, to use any but the finest and subtlest and most pliable tools upon her was impious and absurd. One must imagine – here she was in the looking glass, it made one start,” Woolf writes. (Woolf)

For the protagonist of this story, the Bachelard projection of lifelessness rings true as Woolf writes: “Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody.” (Woolf). In the final revealing scene, the reader learns that Isabella’s current letters are comprised of bills, not even worthy of opening.

This Virginia Woolf work offers a somber treatment of the spinster, revealing alienation and the secret concealed nature of the individual’s soul through the spatial relationships drawn between the mind, the room and its contents.

 

 

 

Orlando: Moving Through Space and Time As a Man, As A Woman

The reader of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando plunges  into a world of suspended disbelief as the individual wanders alongside the protagonist, Orlando, who begins the book ensconced in a courtly life of British nobility and then after a “long sleep” transforms into a female version of Orlando, relegated to face the challenges of operating as a female in a male-dominated world. Extending over a  400-year time span, the reader reels through decades, making observations about social customs, gender disparities and the atmospheres for women and men.  

For reference material for Orlando’s homestead, Woolf relied heavily Vita Sackville West’s writing of her personal experience at her childhood estate in the work, Knole and the Sackvilles. In light of this connection some scholars have said, “It has been one of the sentimental commonplaces attached to Orlando criticism that it is the “longest and most charming love letters in literature.” (Woolf, 1928). Sackville West was prohibited from inheriting Knole from her father, and watched with anguish as the property was transferred to her father’s nephew instead. We further find strains of this in Orlando as the female Orlando faces peril over land claims.  

Now, through the pages of Orlando, we see the male, and then female version of Orlando walk the grounds, participate in courtly activities and ponder literature, politics, gender role and the like. From a space and place perspective, we once again see the formulation of a domestic space. Woolf literature contains a multitude of contexts that underscore the separation of the public sphere and the private, domestic sphere. For example, readers observe Mrs. Dalloway in the book with the same title, take command of the domestic sphere with her parties and we see Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse guide the home and all those who meander under the roof.

Scholars refer to this phenomenon as a “veiled sacredness” or an invisible dynamic.  “I refer here to opposites that we take for granted, such as the contrast between public and private space, family and social space, cultural and utilitarian space and the space of pleasure and the space of work – all opposites that are still actuated by veiled sacredness. (Poststructuralism)

By breathing life into one character, first as a man and then as a woman, Woolf creates Orlando and advances the he/she binary to overtly addresses the dichotomy between male and female activities in social, political and economic spheres.  “The binary division is so deeply implicated in the social production of space, in assumptions about the ‘natural’ and built environments and in the set of regulations which influence who should occupy which spaces and who should be excluded,” according to McDowell in Gender, Identity and Place. (McDowell, 1999)

Woolf’s literary transformation of the body of Orlando from male to female offers a vehicle for discussions about the gender roles of men and women. “Work on the body has also altered understandings of space, as it has become clear that spatial divisions – whether in the home or in the workplace, at the level of the city or the nation-state – are also affected by and reflected in embodied practices and lived social relations,” McDowell states. (McDowell, 1999)

French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu stated that “men are presence in space and women are insignificance.” (McDowell, 1999). We see this dichotomy in Orlando as the protagonist moves from a stately, noble man, to a woman who strives to engage in the social scenes of London.

In the poststructural discussion of Foucault, Woolf’s Orlando typifies a breakthrough a heterotopias: “Heterotopias are linked for the most part to bits and pieces of time i.e., they open up through what we might define as pure symmetry of heterochronisms. The heterotopias enters fully into function when men find themselves in a sort of total breach of their traditional time.” (Poststructuralism). With chronological time interrupted by an individual who lives for several hundred hears, the heterotopia of Orlando emerges. Despite the dichotomy of he/she-ness found throughout the book, Woolf also leaves us with markers to indicate the sameness of men and women.

Woolf points to the individual’s memory and the character as devoid of altering a person’s identity. “The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, the portraits prove, practically the same. His memory – but in the future we must, for convention’s sake, say “her: for “his” and “she” for “he” – her memory then, went back through all of the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. (Woolf, 1928)

 

Bibliography

McDowell, L. (1999). Gender, Identity and Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Poststructuralism. (n.d.).

Woolf, V. (1928). Orlando. Orlando, FLA: Harcourt.