Virginia Woolf (12 page)

²⁰
Ibid. p. 365.

²¹
Ibid.

²²
“Night and Day” p. 365.

²³
Ibid. p. 287.

²⁴
“Night and Day” p. 49.

²⁵
“Orlando” p. 62.

²⁶
“Orlando” p. 62.

²⁷
Ibid. p. 69.

²⁸
Ibid.

²⁹
Ibid. p. 31.

³⁰
Ibid. p. 13.

³¹
“Orlando” p. 121.

³²
Ibid. p. 121.

³³
Ibid. p. 31.

³⁴
Ibid. p. 80.

³⁵
“Orlando” p. 84.

³⁶
Ibid. p. 85.

³⁷
Ibid. p. 86.

³⁸
Ibid. p. 87.

³⁹
“Orlando” p. 87.

⁴⁰
Ibid. p. 87.

⁴¹
Ibid. p. 87.

⁴²
Ibid. p. 157.

⁴³
Ibid. p. 45.

⁴⁴
“Orlando” p. 16.

⁴⁵
Ibid. p. 17.

⁴⁶
Ibid. p. 66.

⁴⁷
“Orlando” p. 242.

⁴⁸
Ibid. p. 245.

⁴⁹
Ibid. p. 276.

⁵⁰
Ibid. p. 274.

T
HE DANGER IN CHOOSING
literary influences, Virginia Woolf perceives, conscious that the great stylists of the past have in the main been men. The woman novelist cannot return only to the women of the past. It is in the men, in the poets and the masculine rhetoricians, that she is taught to seek her molds. However feminine Virginia Woolf’s aspect of life may be, her form is still precariously influenced; she must still confine herself within the frame which man has built for his own needs, the frame of the novel, the lyric or the drama. Even her selection of a form apparently adaptable to woman, the novel, necessitates concession. Having found in the history of style no artistic cast which was irrefutably feminine, she is forced, within womanly restrictions, to accommodate herself to man’s peculiarities, to his diction and the structure he created for his thoughts and emotions.

To maintain her integrity, her poetic womanhood, she selects those men as literary influence whose style woman can wield with least constraint. Characteristically, she studies not the classical Attic writers but the Asiatic ones; not Dryden but Burke or Gibbon; not Pope but Shelley.

A style is analyzed as it is the consummation of those which have preceded it. Even the sportive or revolutionary experiments are evaluated as reactions to tradition and only then comprehended in their singularity. That not only muffled traces of the great stylists of the past appear in Virginia Woolf’s novels, but direct citations and arguments in their defence, is an instrumental consideration of her writing. Her motive, like the traditional artist, is to recreate these influences, manifesting then with what integrity or conscious plagiarism she has schooled herself.

Fresh from the lecture hall, or the advice of tutors, she is, in her first novel, most obviously colored by masculine and academic influence. Gibbon, Burke, Shelley, Milton, Wordsworth and Shakespeare are discussed, debated, admired and defended. Gibbon, a master of the grand style, she envies with the homesickness of a modern who believes perfection to lie dead in the past. “A whole procession of splendid sentences”
¹
from the “Decline and Fall”, she visions as flawless soldiers, entering Hirst’s “capacious brow … marching through his brain in order … until the entire regiment had shifted its quarters.”
²
Rachel is to
be educated to understand Gibbon, since most women lack either the training or the ability. A typical passage is even quoted from him, characterizing his flowing technique. It is a trait enviably sought by Virginia Woolf in her early formation of a style. Rachel, reading the book beneath a tree “with a feeling that to open and read would certainly be a surprising experience, … turned the historian’s page and read that.—

“His generals, in the early part of his reign, attempted the reduction of Aethiopia and Arabia Felix. They marched near a thousand miles to the south of the tropic; but the heat of the climate soon repelled the invaders and protected the unwarlike natives of those sequestered regions …

“Never had any words been so vivid and so beautiful—Arabia Felix— Aethiopia.”
³
Her appreciation, her emotional analysis of the Victorian stylist, is significant for Virginia Woolf’s early inclinations. In her enthusiasm for names with musical alliteration, she shows a distinct romantic heritage. She attempts to imitate the musical device used by Poe in “Ulalume”, by giving the characters in this first novel, liquid names like Rachel Vinrace, Helen, Evelyn, Terence, and Clarissa—a reminiscence of that earlier Richardson figure of utter feminine sentimentality. Her romanticism reaches its peak in the name of the ship “Euphrosyne”. As she develops, the names of her characters grow curiously less romantic and in her last novel, the “Waves”, are as uneuphonious, as solid, as Susan, Jinny and Rhoda.

As she grows more certain of her style, she no longer mentions the literary giants as though she were defending them before an iconoclastic world or repeating the admiration schooled in her. She uses other writers largely to suggest the personality of the character who admires them. William of “Night and Day” precise, fastidious, with a flair for classic formulas, reads Pope. Ralph, his converse, a natural talent and informed in plants and flowers, reads Sir Thomas Browne. Long quotations, as that from Gibbon in her first novel, decrease into a few lines from the poets, especially from Shelley or Shakespeare. Her interest in a model prose style, implicit in the rhetorical masters, disappears as conversation from her novels, and demanding expression, becomes material for essays. Her novels then are freed from the oppression of literary dogmatism. In “The Common Reader” a collection of her essays, she gives vent to her admiring concern for the writers who have in some way influenced her; for Chaucer, Addison, Defoe, Montaigne, the Duchess of Newcastle, Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Conrad, and Sophocles, for “it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the
confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”
⁴
The sort of appreciative propaganda which characterized her first novel, is assimilated slowly as she matures. Hints of it are still apparent in “Night and Day”. She insinuates an indirect defence of Dostoievsky, whose “Stavrogin’s Confession” she has translated, by having Rodney exhort the romantic Cassandra “to read Pope in preference to Dostoievsky, until her feeling for form was more highly developed.”
⁵
Shakespeare is not only defended by Mrs. Hilberry, a poetic Victorian, but she conceives a project of making him public property. With street corner propaganda, she will lower him from the exclusive aristocracy of the critics and make him common good. “I should like to stand at that crossing all day long and say: ‘People, read Shakespeare!’ ”
⁶

Burke’s influence is felt in the careful selectivity of her diction, gaining suggestive power by its rhythm, its tone and its compositional relationship. A description, reminiscent of his purple prose, effects its colorfulness at times through a strict adherence to the objects described, and at others through metaphorical associations.

“When the Spaniards came down from their drinking, a fight ensued, the two parties churning up the sand, and driving each other into the surf. The Spaniards, bloated with fine living upon the fruits of the miraculous land, fell in heaps; but the hardy Englishmen, tawny with sea-voyaging, hairy for lack of razors, with muscles like wire, fangs greedy for flesh, and fingers itching for gold, despatched the wounded, drove the dying into the sea, and soon reduced the natives to a state of superstitious wonderment … From the interior came Indians with subtle poisons, naked bodies, and painted idols; from the sea came vengeful Spaniards and rapacious Portuguese; exposed to all these enemies (though the climate proved wonderfully kind and the earth abundant) the English dwindled away and all but disappeared.”
⁷

The Asiatic flush of this description is gained through the stylistic devices which she has learned from the male rhetoricians, the finesses of balancing, of parallel construction, and triads. Comparing it with Burke’s famous description of the horrors of Hyder Ali, reveals a resemblance not only in the machination, but in the rhythmic rise and fall and the sustained rapidity of motion.

“Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank or sacredness of function, fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities; but escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine.”
⁸

Burke’s unusual denotation of the word “compounding” in his illustrious sentence: “compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into one black cloud”
⁹
has become a constant in her active vocabulary. She repeats the borrowed word in the mold of triads in which Burke had set it: “The power is a mysterious one compounded of beauty, birth, and some rarer gift.”
¹⁰

Other words made memorable by some poet or famous prose writer, are accepted synthetically in her work. “Innumerable”, a favorite of Wordsworth’s and of the romantic poets, suggests to her such liquid rhythm that she constructs euphuistic balance by doubling it repeatedly.

“The housemaids, the innumerable housemaids, the bedrooms, the innumerable bedrooms.”
¹¹

“Innumerable beadles were filling innumerable keys into well-oiled locks.”
¹²

“Her ears were now distracted by the jingling of innumerable bells on the heads of innumerable horses.”
¹³

Echoes of the early grammars she has studied, with their tabulated lists of connotative and denotative diction, their models of rhetorical perfection, persist from her earliest novel to her latest.

Just as famous words of literature become synthetic in her style, so famous phrases are wholly incorporated, given only a slight turn for originality. Milton’s “Sonnet on his Blindness” is appropriated to “the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide—a small one but dear to the possessor—perishing and with it my self, my soul.”
¹⁴
Stevenson’s confession of having “played
the sedulous ape” is converted into “the ape is too distant to be sedulous.”
¹⁵
Shelley’s “Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples”:

“I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care” are literally repeated in her last novel “The Waves”. “I am not going to lie down and weep away a life of care,”
¹⁶
while various lines now “classic” from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” appear throughout all her later novels.

“Should I, after tea and cakes and

ices,

Have the strength to force the

moment to its crisis?”

suggests a similar thought in “The Waves”. “Now let me try … before we rise, before we go to tea, to fix the moment in one effort of supreme endeavour.”
¹⁷
Or “Prufrock’s” last image

“I have seen them riding seaward

on the waves

Combing the white hair of the

waves blown back”.

is startlingly recalled in “Jacob’s Room”: “and life became something that the courageous mount and ride out to sea on— the hair blown back.”
¹⁸

Her manner of adapting these literary influences reveals a significant feature of her work. Deeply style-conscious, hers is a style founded upon wide reading, upon a study of the classicists with the determination to learn from them and find patterns for her own writing. Her method is not only that of recreating but of direct imitation, either conscious or unconscious. Where it is conscious, as the Miltonic reproduction, her imitation is mainly for the sake of effect. The great men need no correction; repeating their thought, she repeats also their expression. Whether these thoughts and their related form are peculiarly masculine or peculiarly feminine here does not concern her; they are the deep truths of life, and if a man has given them perfect expression, she is willing to accept this masculine mold. Where her influences become subconscious, as the influence of Burke, they form for the most part the groundwork of her own personal style. But where they are unassimilated, as the images from T. S. Eliot, they appear almost to be plagiarisms, modified by slight individuality.

With a curious repudiation of her own literary influences, she dissuades women from the masculine stylists whom she herself has invoked. “It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. Lamb, Browne,
Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey—whoever it may he—never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use.”
¹⁹

Yet her own first two novels are indelibly the product of her masculine studies; she has done far more than simply “learnt a few tricks” from Lamb and Sir Thomas Browne. She repudiates men as teachers for the modern woman writer only after her conscious search for influences is ended. She speaks with experience of the dangers in imitating a style alien to her womanhood.