June 16, 2002

Virginia Woolf was an innovator. She did not tell stories in the usual way, she defied conventions. Her method was to take moments and split them into a myriad of sensations, finding, searching for all their several and separate components in order to reach the core.

Woolf is, to a great extent, credited with the emergence of the modernist novel. This novel was a drastic departure from the traditional form, heroics, high emotions, morality, and, most of all, an unambiguous beginning, middle and end. Woolf’s made the novel prismatic, ambiguous, slightly chaotic, amoral and even poetic. Her novel concerned itself, most often, with unremarkable people and did not profess to tell an uplifting tale but strove to render life as it is lived, in its endless overlaps of the quotidian and the profound.

Woolf believed that the world is too huge and mysterious, too impenetrably itself, for fiction as is so often written. Any writer’s attempt to clear the field of its vines and creepers, to frighten off the hostile animals, and to demonstrate a proper sense of right and wrong, was unlikely to be effective. In her fiction Woolf bore witness to the world, saw and recorded some of its patterns, but did not attempt to enforce upon it any particular order or demand that it produce an order of its own.

But it was her attention and sensitivity towards women which made her one of the foremost feminist writer of the twentieth century. Woolf’s concern with feminist themes are most dominant in A room of one’s own, written in 1929, in which she makes the famous statement, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” It deals with the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers, and analyzes the differences between women as objects of representation and women as authors of representation.

A room of one’s own, expresses the frustration women writers past and present have felt. In one of the most well-known sections of the work, Woolf tells the story of Shakespeare’s sister. It is an imaginative speculation about a woman who perhaps possessed the genius of her brother, but was denied, first, the educational opportunities and then the personal opportunities afforded to him. Thwarted by the scornful laughter, disapproval, and limitations of a male-centred world, and afforded no outlets for the expression of her gifts, this woman, Woolf speculates, would have sunk beneath the weight of such conditions into madness or suicide. This personal tragedy, which must have been repeated again and again over the centuries, is compounded by the immense loss to the world of the magnificent and sublime works of art that never had a chance to come into being.

Witty, compassionate and provocative, A room of one’s own is a landmark in both the history of English literary criticism and feminist theory.

Woolf herself was educated at home by her father, had unhindered access to his vast library, and grew up in the family home at Hyde Park Gate. She described this period in a letter to her friend, Vita Sackville-West, as, “Think how I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my father’s books; never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools-throwing balls; ragging; slang; vulgarities; scenes; jealousies!”

Her youth was shadowed by series of emotional shocks — her half-brother Gerald Duckworth sexually abused her and her mother died when she was in her early teens. Stella Duckworth, her half sister, took her mother’s place, but died two years later. Leslie Stephen, her father, suffered a slow death from cancer. When her brother Toby died in 1906, Woolf suffered a prolonged mental breakdown.

Following the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved with her sister Vanessa and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury, which would become central to activities of the Bloomsbury group. The group included Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, Vita Sackville-West, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and John Maynard Keynes. Its members were committed to a rejection of what they felt were the strictures and taboos of Victorianism on religious, artistic, social, and sexual matters. They remained a fairly tight-knit group for many years.

By the 1920s Bloomsbury’s reputation as a cultural circle was fully established to the extent that its mannerisms were parodied and Bloomsbury became a widely used term connoting an insular, snobbish aestheticism. But they were brilliant, varied and the literary output of its members still retains a hold on academic and popular interest.

In 1905 Woolf began to write for the Times Literary Supplement. In 1911, she married Leonard Woolf, a respected left-wing political journalist. Together, they began Hogarth Press, whose publications included works from Freud and T.S. Eliot. Woolf was also a prolific essayist. She published some five hundred essays in periodicals and collections.

Woolf published her first book, The voyage out, in 1915. The book is saturated with the tension between Woolf’s own desire to record the pure sensation of living, her desire to tell a story and her desire to use her fiction to make potent arguments about serious questions. Her first novel, clearly lays bare the poetic style that is the signature of her later fiction. It tells the story of Rachel, a motherless young woman who embarks on a sea voyage to South America and falls in love with an aspiring writer. Needless to say their love is doomed.

In 1919 appeared Night and day. This was a realistic novel set in London, contrasting the lives of two friends, Katherine and Mary. It is both a love story and a social comedy, yet it also questions that tradition, recognizing that the goals of society and the individual may not necessarily coincide. Jacob’s room (1922) was based upon the life and death of her brother Toby. It was her elegy for Toby, and by implication an antiwar novel much like Mrs Dalloway which came later.

Jacob’s room is the story of a sensitive young man whose life story, character and friends are presented in a series of separate scenes and moments from his childhood, through college at Cambridge, love affairs in London, and travels in Greece, to his death in the war. This novel established Woolf’s reputation as a highly poetic and symbolic writer who placed emphasis not on plot or action but on the psychological realm occupied by her characters.

Mrs Dalloway, her best known novel first appeared in 1925. It forms a web of thoughts of several groups of people during the course of a single day. There is little action, but much movement in time from present to past and back again through the characters memories.

Then came To the lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The waves (1931) and Three guineas (1938) which established Woolf as one of the leading writers of modernism. To the lighthouse is a novel split into three sections. Each section is dedicated to a different time period in the lives of the Ramsay family as they vacation at their summer home in Scotland. Orlando is a fantasy novel. It traces the career of the androgynous protagonist from a masculine identity within the Elizabethan court to a feminine identity in 1928.

The waves is perhaps Woolf’s most difficult novel. It follows in soliloquies the lives of six persons from childhood to old age. In it is evidenced in full bloom the innovative literary technique Woolf developed in order to address her primary concern of representing the flow of ordinary experience. Her emphasis was not on the story or characterization but on a character’s consciousness, thoughts and feelings. She brilliantly illuminates these in her ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. She also did not limit herself to one consciousness, but slipped from mind to mind.

The waves is probably her most experimental novel. As she herself argued in her essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ that to get underneath the surfaces one must use less restricted presentation of life, and such devices as stream of consciousness and interior monologue and abandon the linear narrative.

Three guineas examined the necessity for women to lay claim to their own history and literature. Woolf received three separate requests for a guinea, one for a women’s college building fund, one for a society promoting employment for professional women, and one to help prevent war. This book is an answer to these requests. As she examines the three causes and points out that they are inseparably the same, she declares a new tactic of feminine purpose.

Woolf’s interest in humanness, and respect for the ambiguity of human existence always comes through. It is rare to find in her work any instance of an intelligent, humane politician, a competent doctor or an adherent of religion who is not at least slightly deranged. Woolf had lived through the devastation of the first world war, which she called “a preposterous masculine fiction”. She was drawn, throughout her career, to unexceptional lives. She sought to look at the enormity contained in them without the distractions of battle, quest or heroic romance. Her artists are never successful, her scholars and politicians have never gone as far as they’d hoped.

Throughout her life, Woolf had several emotional breakdowns and periods of extreme depression. She was treated for these illnesses, but the treatments did not seem to work. In 1941, she placed a large stone in her pocket and drowned herself in the river. Her body was found eighteen days later by children playing on the bank.

Writer’s email: masoodm@emirates.net.ae

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