Virginia Woolf (23 page)

She attempts to infuse this “curious sexual quality” in her writings, and in describing comparatively normal people, succeeds. “Jacob’s Room” with its stippled sketches of love between mother and son, between artist and model, between husband and wife, between the wife and a lover, is filled with this feminine sexual quality. Sex permeates the book but always with feminine delicacy, verging upon Victorian innuendos. In her language itself and in her descriptions, there is no trace of obscenity; sex is described in veiled insinuations. But there is one scene slipping from
the rest, where suggestiveness goes too far and becomes sentimental, ill-concealed pornography. The bedroom noises are described through the reactions of the sitting room, endowed with life. There is no censurable word uttered, only phrases, apparently innocuous, like “the door was shut”; “wood, when it creaks”; “these old houses … soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt”; muffled with a sentimental personification of a letter as a mother’s heart; “if the pale blue envelope lying by the biscuit-box had the feelings of a mother, the heart was torn by the little creak, the sudden stir”; with the climax, no longer concealed by poetic euphuisms: “behind the door was the obscene thing, the alarming presence.”
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She is shocked by it, “the obscene thing”, she holds it off from her on prongs, shuddering even to name it. Her mind is blocked; she has lost her objectivity, that “incandescence” which she preaches so fervently for others. She falls in her attempt to write without shocking, in Victorian discreetness.

This scene in “Jacob’s Room” is a fine instance of the pitfalls in her sex analysis. But she is too deeply rooted in the modern Freudian atmosphere to evade sex. As a woman, moreover, recognizing in sex a primal force in life, she is sensitive to its value in literature. In “A Room of One’s Own” she preaches a Utopia where the woman novelist will take her notebook into the bordels, unhindered by social criticism or her own self-consciousness. “She will not need to limit herself any longer to the respectable houses of the upper middle classes. She will go without kindness or condescension, but in the spirit of fellowship, into those small, scented rooms where sit the courtesan, the harlot and the lady with the pug dog. There they still sit in the rough and ready-made clothes that the male writer has had perforce to clap upon their shoulders. But Mary Carmichael” (dummying for the modern woman novelist) “will have out her scissors and fit them close to every hollow and angle. It will be a curious sight, when it comes, to see these women as they are, but we must wait a little, for Mary Carmichael will still be encumbered with that self-consciousness in the presence of ‘sin’ which is the legacy of our sexual barbarity. She will still wear the shoddy old fetters of class on her feet.”
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Psychologically, it is this very “self-consciousness in the presence of ‘sin’ ” which makes Virginia Woolf speak so guardedly of Jacob’s bedroom; it is this self-consciousness which causes her to cry out in “Orlando”: “Let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.”
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Yet it is on the note of sex that “Orlando” opens:
“He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—.”
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The duality of Orlando’s sex embodies a doctrine congenial to Virginia Woolf. It is the theory that the great poet is a composite of man and woman, possessing the characteristic endowments of both. Such a belief would account then for the poet’s intuitive understanding of both sexes; it would explain how Shakespeare could have created his women, or Jane Austen, despite her spinsterhood, create men like Mr. Bennett. It would rationalize moreover and raise at least to a plane of understanding, the recurrence of homosexuality among poets, proving that one sex had gained supremacy: in Sappho, the man, and in Shelley and Proust, the woman. But in the greatest poets, in Shakespeare and Goethe, and attempted in Orlando, both sexes have approximately equal weight. While in nature, the coexistence of these two sexes rarely takes physical form, Orlando, unhindered by natural constraint, undergoes the actual bodily changes which differentiate the sexes. Like the early magicians, he can embody his idea, acquiring the physical peculiarities of a woman when his feminine perceptions become dominant.

This theory of homosexuality among poets is not original with Virginia Woolf, though her interpretation of it is. It can be traced back, in concept, like most contemporary doctrines of abnormality, to the Greeks. In Plato’s “Banquet”, the Androgyns are described as a composite man-woman, whom the gods later parted. Sir Thomas Browne, whom Virginia Woolf has studied with care, writes in his “Pseudoxia Epidemica”: “We must acknowledge this Androgynall condition in man”
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while Shakespeare suggests it in the prison scene in “King Richard II”:

My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul:

My soul the father.
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Undoubtedly the most direct influence upon “Orlando” is from Coleridge, whose famous declaration: “The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous”, Virginia Woolf quotes in “A Room of One’s Own”.
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In his “Aids to Reflection”, he accounts for the existence of good and evil in man as the co-existence of a stronger and inferior, i. e. masculine and feminine nature. The stronger male reserve embodies the will and the reason; the inferior, the unreasoning, carnal, easily tempted Eve. As a woman, Orlando has certainly this “inferior” nature; she is sensual and fallible, and her logic is more intuitive than dialectic. But as a man, Orlando’s will is rather dubious, and though he philosophizes constantly, his
inductions are too haphazard and subjective to be called “masculine” pellucid reason. Obviously the effeminate pole of his nature, the part most analogous to Virginia Woolf, is dominant. In “A Room of One’s Own”, she seeks “amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilised and uses all its faculties.”
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Coleridge supports this theory by the “very old tradition of the
homo androgynous
, that is, that the original man, the individual first created was bisexual”,
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a belief limited not to Greece or Egypt or Jerusalem, but found even in Persian and Indian antiquity. Orlando, explained as a conscious outgrowth of this tradition, becomes less esoteric. His change of sex appears then as a philosophic possibility, conceived in remote antiquity, rather than as the extravagance of a modern ingenious woman. Through a progression in time, he is able to embody both sexes separately. Virginia Woolf disjoins the male and female within him just as the Greek gods had disjoined the Androgyns.

There is almost no perversion in Orlando’s bi-sexuality. As a man, he has a strong predilection towards women, makes violent love to princesses and lies with “loose women among treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships.”
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His virility is certified. As a woman, she is no less attracted by men. She adopts instinctively the necessary preliminaries to love. Coquetry, modesty, and an interest in clothes become as natural as cutting off a head or committing any of the barbarisms which give the stamp to manhood. Her bearing a child proves that she is normal, if one accepts Freud’s theory that perverts have renounced all claim to reproduction: „auf jede Beteiligung an der Fortpflanzung verzichtet”.
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Orlando then remains physically true to sex, whichever it be. Turning woman, “she remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented and exquisitely apparalled.

“ ‘Now I shall have to pay in my own person
for those desires,’ she reflected.”
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But when the Captain of the “Enamoured Lady” offers her a slice of corned beef, she is filled with the same “indescribable pleasure” which as a man she had experienced with the Russian princess. But “then she had pursued, now she fled. Which is the greater ecstasy? The man’s or the woman’s? And are they not perhaps the same? No, she thought, this is the most delicious (thanking the Captain but refusing), to refuse, and see him frown … to resist and to yield, to yield and to resist. Surely it throws the spirit into such a rapture as nothing else can.”
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Yet though she glories in her femininity, “ ‘Praise God that I’m a woman’ ”,
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traces of Lesbianism appear before her conversion is complete. Through an unfinished metamorphosis, these traits are explained, for “as all Orlando’s loves had been women, now through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man.”
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But this Lesbianism disappears, and Orlando accepts “the penalties and the privileges of her position.”
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Regarding “Orlando” as largely autobiographical, the early period of his masculinity would be analogous to that stage in Virginia Woolf and in almost every girl, when she longs to be a boy. The freedom and experiences barred to Virginia Woolf are unquestioningly opened to him. Her feminine Utopia where the woman novelist can observe every phase of life is still of the future. Even Orlando is forced to don pants, to appear at least as a man, each time she visits “Nell’s parlour”. It is only after a young girl has lost her curiosity and her longing for experience, that she grows reconciled to her sex and in it seeks happiness. It is at this stage that Orlando becomes a woman, returning to England in search of rest, after travelling through Turkey and encountering as many escapades as a Don Quixote or a Simplicissimus or any hero of a seventeenth century novel of adventure. Only as a man could Orlando have experienced “Life” in its variated heights and depths, in the courts of kings and in dark alleyed harbors. But it is the female Orlando, who can feel with intensity the impulse for physical and spiritual completion, for “Life and a Lover”.
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She longs not only to
observe life but to feel herself part of its rhythm. She marries; she bears a son. She is physically creative, physically complete. Yet her desire to write is not obliterated. She remains a poetess, finding as much inspiration in her womanhood as before in the experiences of a man. With almost a Greek harmony of bodily and mental creativeness, she combines in herself the traits of man and woman, spiritually productive in the face of the male critics, and bodily reproductive, continuing the function of woman in the process of life.

In her attempt to understand women, Virginia Woolf seeks not only normal women, building in their femininity the pole to men, but women who combine within themselves, like the Lady Orlando, both poles, or who tend even more towards masculinity. Although her men are frequently effeminate, it is not they but the women who appear abnormal. Yet their Lesbianism is never absolutely indulged. Their Puritan upbringing and social environment make practical perversions almost inconceivable. “Chastity” Virginia Woolf writes significantly, “had then [in the seventeenth century], it has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.”
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Struggling in herself against this Puritanism, against the old social horror of sex held by respectable women, Virginia Woolf achieves a stage where she can, with objectivity, analyze sexual anomalies. To a group of college women, she makes a startling revelation: ‘Chloe liked Olivia … ’ Do not start. Do not blush. [Traces of her own Victorianism, suppressed at last.] Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

“ ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely “Antony and Cleopatra” would have been altered had she done so! … Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple.”
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Her own conviction that as a woman she can best penetrate the consciousness of woman, has helped her to broaden her scope. In her novels, her interest in her sex begins with normal women
and their relations to men, and matures to abnormal women and their relations to each other. The psychology of the Lesbian attracts her; she sees in it that duality of sex, that coexistence of man and woman, which she describes at length in “A Room of One’s Own” and substantiates in “Orlando”. In Mrs. Dalloway’s relation to Sally Seton lie definite masculine traits; Clarissa is charmed by Sally’s voice and her recklessness; she has the man’s instinct to protect the woman he loves. The feeling “was protective on her side, sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something ‘that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling … ”
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A dread of marriage, the hallucination of man as a brute occurs so frequently in a girl’s adolescence that it may well be regarded as normal. It is the Brünhilde instinct for self-preservation; the virginal fear of losing her identity and strength. Yet Clarissa’s revulsion from men continues long after her marriage. As a girl, though she gives it no visible expression, this dread finds strong outlet in her emotions. She recoils from the thought that Sally whom she loves, is to be broken by men: “she felt only how Sally was being mauled already, maltreated.”
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The masculinity of her nature, her search for that sensation from women which normally men experience, is most apparent when Sally has “kissed her on the lips.” “The most exquisite moment of her whole life … . The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally.”
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Such androgynal sensations are forced to remain concealed, for she “had a scruple picked up Heaven knows where”, her social bans, “or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise).”
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It is an instinctive or acquired purity, thoroughly understood by Virginia Woolf. Thus, though Mrs. Dalloway reproaches herself for it, in her relations to her husband, she is involuntarily frigid. “She could not dispel a virginity which clung to her like a sheet. Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came a moment—for example on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden—when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him. And then at Constantinople, and again and again.”
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Frigidity assumes towards her husband the warmth she had experienced towards Sally. She analyzes this neurosis: “She could see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central
which permeated, something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For
that
she could dimly perceive.”
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“That” italicized, this homosexual abnormality, Virginia Woolf recoils from naming. Like a priest raising his voice with disdain, she brands it with italics and then describes less cryptically how Mrs. Dalloway “could not resist yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident—like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments)” suggesting the fetishisms and poetic sensibilities so often inherent in Lesbianism, “she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over— the moment.”
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In its flowing sensuality, this experience recalls the ecstatic moments which D. H. Lawrence perceives between man and woman. The same sensation of heightened living is in both, the sense of touching the core of life. “The pressure of rapture”, the moment of spiritual conjugation between two women has the surging rhythm of Lawrence’s “whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling.”
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