Virginia Woolf and the Modernist Mind

Dr. Susan Solomon5/21/2014

Virginia Woolf in popular culture

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Selected Works:• Jacob’s Room (1922)• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)• To the Lighthouse

(1927)• “A Room of One’s Own”

(1929)• The Waves (1931) “Three Guineas” (1938)

1882-1941

1895: X-rays discovered; cinematograph and wireless telegraph invented;

1899-1902: Boer War (75,000 deaths)1903: first airplane flight by Wright

Brothers1905: Einstein’s Special Theory of

Relativity1914: Irish Home Rule Bill passed; 1914-1918: Over 16 million deaths in

WW1 1918: Women over 30 earn vote in

England1921-2: Irish Free State founded and

proclaimed1923: BBC radio first broadcast

1927: first Transatlantic flight by Lindbergh

1927: first talkie films 1929: NY stock exchange collapse –

world depression 1930: USA television 1933: Hitler elected chancellor; Spanish Civil War 1936-39 (500,000

deaths) 1936: BBC television1938: Germany begins expansion into

Austria1941: Pearl Harbor, Germany invades

Soviet Union (over 60 million deaths)

Fleischer Studies: The Einstein Theory of Relativity, 1923

also from Fleischer Brothers

Sir Leslie Stephen• 1832-1904• Alpinist, Cambridge-

educated• Editor, Dictionary of

National Biography (1882-1890)

• Model of Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse: philosopher who studies “subject object and the nature of reality” or “think of a kitchen table when you’re not there”

•

Woolf on Leslie Stephen

• “[. . .]the disparity, so obvious in his books, between the critical and the imaginative power. Give him a thought to analyse, the thought say of Mill or Bentham or Hobbes, and he is (so Maynard told me) a model of acuteness, clarity, and impartiality. Give him a character to explain, and he is (to me) so crude, so elementary, so conventional that a child with a box of chalks could make a more subtle portrait” (Sketch of the Past 146)

Bloomsbury

Omega Workshop Textile by Vanessa Bell

Notable Members IncludedJohn Maynard Keynes,Lytton Strachey, George E. Moore,Bertrand Russell, E.M. Forster, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Stephen/Woolf,Vanessa Stephen/Bell

Hogarth Press

• Founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917

• “A Mark on the Wall” was, together with Leonard’s “Three Jews,” the first publication.

On Mrs. Dalloway

• “the real ‘I’ is the ever-flowing stream known only to ourselves, and it is with this ‘I’ that Mrs. Woolf deals. … In the course of three hundred pages which record this day nothing happens except that the reader is brought into intimate contact with a group of people and made to participate in their consciousness” (Joseph Wood Crutch, “The Stream of Consciousness” The Nation CXX, 3126, June 3, 1925, 631-21).

in The Waves (1931)• “Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-

handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there.”

Counterexample: A Scandal in Bohemia

• “The lamps had been lit, but the blinds had not been drawn, so that I could see Holmes as he lay upon the couch. I do not know whether he was seized with compunction at that moment for the part he was playing, but I know that I never felt more heartily ashamed of myself in my life than when I saw the the beautiful creature against whom I was conspiring, or the grace and kindliness with which she waited upon the injured man. And yet it would be the blackest treachery to Holmes to draw back now from the part which he had intrusted to me” (10-11).

Example: James Joyce: Ulysses, Ep.8Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He

swerved to the right.Is it? Almost certain. Won't look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too

heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted his

eyes. Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?

Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold

statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.

A rewritingAs Mr Bloom came to Kildare street he was thinking to

himself that he must stop at the library before he proceeds with the rest of his business for the day.

From the opposite direction a tall figure in a straw hat was walking with the sunlight on his back. Bloom thought he recognized him. When he looked down to see the man’s tan shoes and turnedup trousers he was certain that the man was Blazes Boylan, his wife’s lover, the last man he wanted to run into.

His heart quopped softly as he thought to himself that he must turn to the right. “Museum. Goddesses”-- he thought confusedly to himself and he swerved to the right.

Review from 101: Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”

101 Review: Allegory of the Cave

• Chained prisoners who cannot move their heads watch the shadows of things passing by a fire behind them.

• They accept the shadows as reality, because it is the only reality they know

• The cave represents our body, senses• Shadows represent the phenomenal world surrounding

us• The world outside of the cave represents the Platonic

Real, truth, the unknowable noumena

Fireside meditations

stream of consciousness, n. (OED)

• Psychol. An individual’s thoughts and conscious reaction to external events experienced subjectively as a continuous flow. Also loosely, an uncontrolled train of thought or association

• Literary Criticism. A method of narration which depicts events through this flow in the mind of a character; an instance of this

Stream of Consciousness

• What psychology must study “is the fact that in each of us, when awake (and often when asleep), some kind of consciousness is always going on. There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields, (or of whatever you wish to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life. (William James Talks to Teachers on Psychology 1899 qtd in “Stream” 170).

What was new in Richardson’s Interim according to May Sinclair?

In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on […] In identifying herself with this life, which is Miriam’s stream of consciousness, Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first, of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close. (Little Review April, 1918)

Standard Features of Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness narratives generally have no defined setting, no dramatic action, and no authoritative narrator who intervenes, comments, and controls the story.

Instead all of this content is presented “indirectly” (or should we say directly?) in the consciousness of a character.

There is therefore also no clear difference between what objectively takes place in reality and what is subjectively perceived.

On Mrs. Dalloway

• “the real ‘I’ is the ever-flowing stream known only to ourselves, and it is with this ‘I’ that Mrs. Woolf deals. … In the course of three hundred pages which record this day nothing happens except that the reader is brought into intimate contact with a group of people and made to participate in their consciousness” (Joseph Wood Crutch, “The Stream of Consciousness” The Nation CXX, 3126, June 3, 1925, 631-21).

in The Waves (1931)• “Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-

handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there.”

Counterexample: A Scandal in Bohemia

• “The lamps had been lit, but the blinds had not been drawn, so that I could see Holmes as he lay upon the couch. I do not know whether he was seized with compunction at that moment for the part he was playing, but I know that I never felt more heartily ashamed of myself in my life than when I saw the the beautiful creature against whom I was conspiring, or the grace and kindliness with which she waited upon the injured man. And yet it would be the blackest treachery to Holmes to draw back now from the part which he had intrusted to me” (10-11).

Example: James Joyce: Ulysses, Ep.8Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses.

He swerved to the right.Is it? Almost certain. Won't look. Wine in my face. Why did I?

Too heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted

his eyes. Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?

Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold

statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.

A rewritingAs Mr Bloom came to Kildare street he was thinking to

himself that he must stop at the library before he proceeds with the rest of his business for the day.

From the opposite direction a tall figure in a straw hat was walking with the sunlight on his back. Bloom thought he recognized him. When he looked down to see the man’s tan shoes and turnedup trousers he was certain that the man was Blazes Boylan, his wife’s lover, the last man he wanted to run into.

His heart quopped softly as he thought to himself that he must turn to the right. “Museum. Goddesses”-- he thought confusedly to himself and he swerved to the right.

Review from 101: Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”

101 Review: Allegory of the Cave

• Chained prisoners who cannot move their heads watch the shadows of things passing by a fire behind them.

• They accept the shadows as reality, because it is the only reality they know

• The cave represents our body, senses• Shadows represent the phenomenal world surrounding

us• The world outside of the cave represents the Platonic

Real, truth, the unknowable noumena

Fireside meditations

the Real tablecloth

• “The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons …. and tableclothes were not entirely real” (CP 269).

• “but these generalisations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough: which, as a child, one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation” (“The Mark”)

• “But I can see clearly how the case stands: my mind loves to wander, and cannot yet suffer itself to be retained within the just limits of truth” (Descartes 55)

Inverted upheavals

• “It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. […] Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing. . . . There is a vast upheaval of matter” (“The Mark” CP 27)

• “[…] since I have procured for myself an assured leisure in a peaceable retirement, I shall at last seriously and freely address myself to the general upheaval of all of my former opinions” (Meditations CP 12-13)

Mystery Solved

• “Someone is standing over me and saying: • “I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”• “Yes?”• “Though its no good buying newspapers. . . .

Nothing ever happens. Curse this war. God damn this war! . . . All the same I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.” (CP 271-272)

“The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms. […] Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern … which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness” (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”).