Authors: Ruth Gruber
The little things in life, the scarves and windows, she describes with feminine integrity; they are the things which touch women, an element of beauty in their lives. The sensory experience derived from clothes and ornamentation, may be described with the same emotional rhythm and imagery as experiences long conventionalized. An analysis of woman’s sensations in a modern department store, of the awakening perceptions of desire, of envy, of hunger, or of aesthetic satisfaction, may penetrate her consciousness as poignantly as would an analysis of her love-life. These reactions demand no revolutionary experiments in expression. Yet an obsolete style, filled with allegory or conceits, would seem little better than a comedy of anachronisms, an extravaganza in style.
In her most signal essay, “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf lays down a platform in which the woman novelist can find truest expression. You must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemist’s bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudo-marble.”
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Sensory apperceptions are as vital, evoked by an apothecary, as those evoked by nature. The irresistible attraction of a shopping-center is a value rarely denied, though often ridiculed or overlooked by masculine writers. Mrs. Dalloway’s reaction to the London shopping district is denotative of her whole romantic feminine nature: “Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; … a few pearls; salmon on an ice-block.”
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In her “passion for gloves” lies a penetrating characteristic of her fastidious personality: “Her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves.”
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The urge for selectivity, for choosing the proper objects as material, has been one of the moot problems of all literature.
Not only form changes from age to age, but the interests change too. And just as the selection from the vast soil of human potentialities, depends upon the personality of the writer, so it depends also upon his sex. Integrity is imminent; a writer is of necessity discounted if he yields weakly to dictated standards. Yet women have been expected to submit unquestioningly to the standards imposed by men, to use a form which man has evolved to suit himself, and objects which have meaning for him. “But it is obvious,” Virginia Woolf writes, “that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet 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 A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.”
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The expression of feminine values, characterizes for Virginia Woolf the integrity of the woman novelist. Subjectively conscious of the power which trifling femininities may have upon the emotions, she describes the texture of a dress, its color and its style, as carefully as Wells might describe a Utopian invention. More poetically than he, she infuses her details with feminine denotations. The dress becomes the symbol of the characters, marking their desires and personality. “‘This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity,’ ”
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says Rhoda, in revolting unhappily against the masses. Jinny’s reaction to clothes, directly following, stamps her contrasting nature. Without conflict or rebellion, she finds in clothes the very expression of herself, the means with which she makes her debut into life. In the waving of a scarf, the fluttering of a dress, she discovers her meaning in life. Attracting men, part of the lawful rhythm of the waves, she finds in these preliminaries to human intercourse, the essence of love, the quintessence of life. Through her dress, she reflects herself: “ ‘for winter I should like a thin dress shot with red threads that would gleam in the firelight. Then when the lamps were lit, I should put on my red dress and it would be thin as a veil, and would wind about my body, and billow out as I came into the room,
pirouetting. It would make a flower shape as I sank down, in the middle of the room, on a gilt chair’ ”.
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Just as her clothes typify Jinny’s personality, so in “Jacob’s Room”, the dress becomes epithetic, and Sandra is repeatedly characterized, with Homeric inconography, as “veiled in white”
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symbolic of her Grecian beauty. Her dress, her lipstick, her handkerchief, the weapons which woman employs for conquering or defending herself are, though immeasurably different from man’s, no less effective. A powder-puff may be as deadly as a sword, “obliterating in its passage all the most fervent feelings of the human heart.”
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The beauty of a well served dinner, Virginia Woolf finds can be as profound as the beauty of a sunset. The composition of a bowl of fruit, the possibilities of which had been recognized as a rich subject for painting, may obtain as well for literary description. The long tradition of household cares has made her sensitive to apparently insignificant objects. As much emotion may be aroused through the position of a fork beside a napkin, as much nervousness or satisfaction, as through the position of a tree against the sky. Design is everywhere, even the patterns of food may be symbolic of the accidents of life. “ ‘How strange,’ said Susan, ‘the little heaps of sugar look by the side of our plates. Also the mottled peelings of pears, and the plush rims to the looking-glasses. I had not seen them before. Everything is now set; everything is fixed. Bernard is engaded’ ”.
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‘The order experienced in life as prearranged, imposes itself conceptually upon a woman’s arrangement of the table. There is an awakening to the human dispensation of trifling objects, reflecting the superhuman structure of the universe.
The contemporary interest in formalism, seen as the relationship of shapes, often selects, the unimportant or the extraordinary for material and gives them new values. Seeking a flexibility between style and thought, tradition and experiment, Virginia Woolf combines her old rhetorical standards with which she had sung of nature, with this new structural formalism explicit of her interest in still-life.
Food, its colors, its form, interests her as it interests a Cezanne, for the sensuous satisfaction it obtains. In the general impulse to see complexity and loveliness in attributes before unnoticed, she describes the formal beauty in the juxtaposition of fruit, variously shaped. “Her eyes had been going in and out among the curves and shadows of the fruit, among
the rich purples of the low-land grapes, then over the horny ridge of the shell, putting a yellow against a purple, a curved shape against a round shape, without knowing why she did it, or why, every time she did it, she felt more and more serene.”
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An aesthetic gratification induced by still-life diffuses her with the calmness which poets had been used to seek in the woods at the side of a lake.
Formal satisfaction, indigenous to this age, she supplements with the romantic associations typical of her style: “the arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold … ”
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Combining the culinary heritage of her sex with a romantic contemporary delight in minutiae, Virginia Woolf experiences in food not only the possibilities of aesthetic satisfaction but a deep physical pleasure. Novelist and woman, she is concerned with food as it is a primal necessity; hunger is a biologic urge of which she is not ashamed. “It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine.”
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Her own characters dine luxuriously; no attic poverty entices her. With a mixture of feminine sensitivity to food and a poetic urge for conceits, she describes a meal in diction suggestive of the Cavalier poets. A dish of soles, spread with “a counterpane of the whitest cream”, is branded “like the spots on the flanks of a doe”. Sprouts are “foliated as rosebuds but more succulent”, and a pudding, “wreathed in napkins” rises “all sugar from the waves.”
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Just as the male novelists had often used environments which were peculiarly masculine, as battle-fields and halls for parliament, so Virginia Woolf seeks that setting which is peculiarly feminine—the room. “For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force.”
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The room is a fixated image throughout
her works; in “A Room of One’s Own” it is the refuge for the feminine artist; the seclusion from the critic with freedom to write and think. Her women, oppressed by society, flee to their rooms as poets flee back to nature, there to find themselves. “ ‘I went back to my room by myself and I did— what I liked’ ”,
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says Katherine of “Night and Day”. It is in her room in solitude that she becomes “a creature of uncalculating passion and instinctive freedom.”
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The room, like a civilized substitute for nature, is not only the harbor for desperate flights, but is as “Jacob’s Room” or Mrs. Dalloway’s ballroom, the background for life, the stage molded by and itself molding the characters. Both men and women are seen against this setting. The room or its smaller counterpart, the railway carriage, become the sources for the material of life.
In the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, “Life” in the form of the old woman Mrs. Brown, is analyzed against the background of a train compartment. It is Virginia Woolf’s great complaint against the Edwardians, against Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy, that they do not see the life in the room, that they evade Mrs. Brown and look out of the window. “ ‘I fill my mind,’ ” she says through Bernard, “ ‘with whatever happens to be the contents of a room or a railway carriage as one fills a fountain pen in an inkpot’ ”.
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Her sensitivity to the room is as vitally feminine as is her sensitivity to food and clothes. Its expression is a trenchant mark of her will to create as a woman. The rooms she observes are as varied as continental landscapes; but more subjective than nature, they are created and determined by the women who inhabit them. “The rooms differ so completely; they are calm or thunderous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a prison yard; are hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers—one has only to go into any room in any street for the whole of that extremely complex force of femininity to fly in one’s face”
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Her aspect of life, the background against which she conceives her men as well as her women, projects itself into the room and the window. In the room conflicts are fought and overcome; passions or indifferences are stimulated by the walls and the atmospheric setting, just as lights and tones are brought out in a portrait by its background. At the window the room is negated; one flees, perhaps from the sofa with its associations of sex, and in looking out at the stars, grows almost sexless. The window is
for the poetic man or woman; it is the harbor for dreams. In the window and the room is seen the conflict of the individual against society, of the people who flee from reality and those who determine to stay, to find themselves in life. Woman as well as man is communal in the room, in the sitting or the dining room. She is seen and sees herself as a relationship. At the window she is abstracted from the whole. The window replaces the romanticist’s mountain top, from which the characters, restless, unhappy, lonely, characters like Katherine and Louis, look down into the street, as the romanticists look down into the valley. They note the sounds, the passers-by. Detached from the rhythm of the room, they respond tremblingly to the symphonic rhythm of the unknown world.
The characters of Virginia Woolf’s novels might be divided into those who fit into the room, who have found themselves in life, and those who stand at windows, the dreamers, the anchorites. In the room belong the great women, perfected mentally and bodily, women like Mrs. Ambrose of “The Voyage Out”. It is a room conceived like the last gallery in the Louvre with its tall flawless statue in the center and around it the marble floor and velvet stools for worshippers. At the window belongs Rachel, dreaming of music, discontent with mankind, in love. The politicians, the successful novelists, and most of the scholars would fit into the room; at the window, the lovers, the spinsters and the poets who have not yet arrived.
Through a deep psychological analysis of her reactions to the room and to its people, Virginia Woolf thus attempts to make her novels irrefutably feminine, the creation of a woman. Not to flaunt her sex, not to justify or evade it artificially; her ideal is to “write as a woman but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.
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She demands no sterility, no social aberrations for the novelist; only a normal sexuality, giving blood and freshness to her creation.