The no holds barred, all bets are off, anything goes, Virginia Woolf discussion thread

How did Woolf measure up as a writer of feminist literature back then, Boomer, and would she be recognizable as such today...or is she simply a historical figure at some kind of turning point for feminism?  (She certainly turned on J.M.Keynes and others in their exclusive English clubishness). I used to think of her as an extension of the "blue stockings".

Virginia Woolf is a singular author. Mrs. Dalloway (and The Hours) is wonderful, but imo she didn't hit her stride until To the Lighthouse and The Waves. If you want a handle on Woolf's feminism, George, you need look no further than the spectacular A Room of One's Own (1929). You can read it in an hour, but a few of my favourite ever quotes, which defined a century of literary feminism, are:

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a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

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Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

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Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, esayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women, chased my simple and single question--Why are women poor?

Then of course, there is her famous hypothetical about Shakespeare's sister Judith, who, though endowed with the same talents, she meets a very different, and very tragic end. Her biography makes feminism by example: aside from being the preeminient female modernist, she is perhaps one of the best writers ever. She loved to drive, she owned and operated a printing press, she inspired, critiqued and mentored many great male writers and poet, and she was probably a lesbian (bisexual at the very least).

As for her relationship with Freud, I can't remember the necessary criticism that addresses this question. She definitely attended several of Freud's lectures and met him in person several times. I know she published the first reviews of his work in Britain. She certainly engages with his ideas in her texts. She is fascinated with the idea of the ego and the id, or the separation between the 'I' and the individual ("'I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being"). Moreover, as anyone who has read Mrs Dalloway can tell you, she contributed to the cultural dominant, articulated by Freud, of retreat into the unconscious in order to solve the era's big questions. 

But, the single criticism that will chase Woolf forever, is her classism ('Of the two - the vote and the money', she said of her heritage, 'the money, I own, seemed infinitely more important'). Of course, feminism in America found its legs with the white upper middle classes (despite the efforts of Soujourner Truth), so perhaps it is not fair to condemn Woolf for using her inherent classism as the engine with which she found both her success and her sense of social justice. My favourite quote in showing her classist blind spot comes from "Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown", when she is talking about how literature and, indeed, life, is changing as modernity extends its embrace of the twentieth century:

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In life one can see change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one's cook. The Victorian lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow The Daily Herald now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more instances of the power of the human race to change?

Yes, Virginia. We do ask for more evidence of change than our cook asking us for adivce about a hat. Also, I know no other modernist who refers to inhabitants of the 1920s as 'Georgians'.

Right. I will look  for her work. Library first.

Interesting line: "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction"

I've just finished reading Witold  Rybczynski's (got it)  "Home" (I'm sure I've mispelled his name) in which he quotes from Jane Austen's Emma and uses an illustration of a young German woman in "her room" to make the point of the importance of "a room of her own" at the opening of the 19th century. The line would have described Austen's thoughts exactly, and we see it in her characters.

It is a sentiment that emerged with the movement  in architecture  toward family and privacy during the late 1700s, although one suspects that, in a later century, Woolf  felt more than money and a room were necessary elements in the writing process.

I never was afraid of  Virginia Wolf - just didn't think that from the snotty heights of her set, she had much to tell the lower orders...cooks and such.

Boom Boom wrote:

"Life itself, every moment of it, evry drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent's Park, was enough. Too much, indeed."

It's wonderful, like every other sentence in that book. But the "too much, indeed" is especially poignant, considering how she met her end.

All right, Boom Boom, now you've got me going:

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Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one.

The two quotes from Mrs. Dalloway posted by Boom Boom and Unionist point to the philosophical problem modernity posed to the changing world. Woolf was engaging with Henri Bergson (the Jacque Derrida du jour) and his Time and Free Will (1910). Bergson examined modernity's increasing fascination with time--basically, the difference between clocktime--a spatial metaphor used to measure something inherently unmeasurable--and what he called durée, or duration.

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Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states...[it] forms both the past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another. Might it not be said that, even if these notes succeed one another, yet we perceive them in one another, and that their totality may be compared to a living being whose parts, although distinct, permeate one another just because they are so closely connected ?

So you see Woolf's fascination with the way the 'slicing and shredding' of time was impossible to ignore, by virtue of the sheer number of public clocks (Harley Street, and the shopfront of Rigby and Lowndes). Its connection to commerce is also telling: modernity ushers in an era where time is commodifed: minimum hourly and daily wages traded for trinkets and food. But (and here's her fascination with Freud) the mind, and durée, offer a solution: you can fit an entire novel in the space of one day, where the past, present and future freely intermix (consider also Septimus, the shellshocked veteran who cannot differentiate between the past and present). So, we have 'Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun'. Beautiful!

This tension is perhaps  articulated best at the end of the beautiful, tragic Waves:

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'Yes, but suddenly one hears a clock tick. We who had been immersed in this world became aware of another. It is painful.... He, who had been thinking with the unlimited time of the mind, which stretches in a flash from Shakespeare to ourselves, poked the fire and began to live by that other clock which marks the approach of a particular person. The wide and dignified sweep of his mind contracted. He became on the alert. I could feel him listening to sounds in the street. I noted how he touched a cushion. From the myriads of mankind and all time past he had chosen one person, one moment in particular. A sound was heard in the hall. What he was saying wavered in the air like an uneasy flame. I watched him disentangle one footstep from other footsteps; wait for some particular mark of identification and glance with the swiftness of a snake at the handle of the door....So concentrated a passion shot out others like foreign matter from a still, sparkling fluid. I became aware of my own vague and cloudy nature full of sediment, full of doubt, full of phrases and notes to be made in pocket-books. The folds of the curtain became still, statuesque; the paperweight on the table hardened; the threads on the curtain sparkled; everything became definite, external, a scene in which I had no part. I rose, therefore; I left him.

Boom Boom:

"Virginia Woolf began writing Between the Acts in April 1938 at her country home, Monks House. As she was writing, bombers flew overhead, and a Nazi conquest of Europe seemed imminent. Her diaries during this period record her anger at the success of Nazi and Allied propaganda to arouse mass enthusiasm for war. As Patricia Klindienst Joplin notes, "To achieve the goal of creating [the Nazi] folk community (identified with structure), the Third Reich redefined every occasion which used to offer the people a taste of communitas, or release from official structure: folk celebrations, religious ritual and art" (93). Woolf witnessed Nazi demonstrations in spring 1935 when she traveled to Germany with Leonard Woolf (Bell 2: 189). The Nazi phenomenon and her observation of the "hero-making" rituals in England (Diary 5: 292), led to her study of ritual and group formations in Between the Acts."

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I think I'll start with Between the Acts, Boomer. Your presentation suggests she was formulating a more social appreciation of the individual's  fate by then.  But readers of Woolf will correct me if that is not the case, if her appreciation for society as more than an "upstairs/downstairs" dichotomy was already well advanced by 1938,  I'm sure.