Virginia Woolf

by Ruth Gruber

  Yet though she glories in her femininity, “ ‘Praise God that I’m a woman’ ”,36 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.”37 But this Lesbianism disappears, and Orlando accepts “the penalties and the privileges of her position.”38

  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”.39 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.”40 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.”41

  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 … ”42 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.”43 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.”44 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).”45 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.”46 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.”47 “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.”48 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 La
wrence’s “whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling.”49

  “But this question of love,” Mrs. Dalloway meditates, “this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all been love?”50 Here is little attempt at concealment. Clarissa’s abnormality, however much poeticized, seems indisputable. All social attempts to deny it, her marriage, her maternity, are useless. She is inhibited by the rigidity of her education; “she knew nothing about sex nothing about social problems.”51 Problems evidently of perversions as well as wealth. “She had once seen an old man who had dropped dead in a field” her only knowledge of the nude male body; “she had seen cows just after their calves were born. But Aunt Helena never liked discussion of anything (when Sally gave her William Morris, it had to be wrapped in brown paper).”52 To break completely from such an environment would necessitate more strength and perhaps a deeper, more dramatic neurosis than Clarissa’s. She does nothing to shock society or Aunt Helena; she does nothing to violate her own sense of purity. Towards her husband, she appears as the Victorian martyr-wife, surrendering to him her passionless love. But she represents a new understanding of this Victorianism; Virginia Woolf, with the aid of Freud and modern sex-consciousness, throws a romantic light upon this concept of inviolable virginity.

  The relation between Elizabeth, Mrs. Dalloway’s daughter, and her governess, Miss Kilman, is another example of Virginia Woolf’s feminine interest in the contact between two women. The disparity in age, however, makes this relationship seem less psychotic than that between Clarissa and Sally, in love with each other’s beauty or protective strength. Here the attraction is that of teacher and pupil, of admiration for superior intelligence, and in the governess, of a diverted instinct of maternity. It is a psychologic reflection of the relationships so universal in girl’s schools that they are now almost naturally accepted. Frequently known under the expressive name of “crush”, they are indicative probably of the physical desire. As with Clarissa, Miss Kilman’s relationship takes no form obnoxious to society, but the emotions and the conscious sensations which society condemns, are present. Miss Kilman, an unhappy character, forced, by her inability to attract men, into almost a state of sexlessness, diverts all her emotions to Elizabeth. With the peculiar androgynousness of an Orlando or a Mrs. Dalloway, she experiences an overwhelming desire to possess Elizabeth. “If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and for ever and then die; that was all she wanted.”53 Her need is as great as a man’s, her jealousy seems even greater; she “could not let her go! this youth, that was so beautiful; this girl, whom she genuinely loved.”54 She is painfully aware of her desire, and with the tragic apprehension that it is doomed, she frustrates it helplessly herself. She feels a compulsion to reveal herself to Elizabeth in all her spiritual ugliness, in her egotism, her intelligence and her ostentatious poverty.

  Elizabeth’s attitude is less androgynous. She is fascinated by the older woman, but her attraction is mystic, not sensual. Her religious appetencies have been aroused. She is edified by a quest for God just as Mrs. Dalloway is for beauty. She loses herself, like countless women, in apocryphal revelations, in “religious ecstasy”.55 Miss Kilman, initiating her into Communion, supplying her with books, becomes an admirable medium, dispensable as soon as Elizabeth outgrows her need.

  Each of these women represents a different phase of the contemporary feminine problem, of the psychopathic women who are only now finding understanding. Recent works like Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” published in 1928, have brought new sympathy for the Sapphic relationships of women.

  Devoid of beauty or womanly charm, Miss Kilman represents that mass of intellectual women unable to attain normal happiness. She compensates by becoming a blue-stocking and a religious fanatic. She develops her mind and her spirit, because her body is negative, and through her mind she seeks to attract others. Discouraged by men, she turns to women, especially to those who possess the feminine charm she lacks. She is not a Lesbian, not more masculine than feminine, but a woman forced by circumstances, by her physical heritage for which she is hardly to blame, to divert her impulses. Envy and jealousy take the place of love. She seeks in Elizabeth her lost youth, and beholds in her what she herself would have longed to be. Elizabeth, contrastively, represents the problem of the adolescent girl, seeking some spiritual outlet. Her attachment to the older woman arouses a jealousy and hatred in Clarissa, her mother, generating a further complexity in this structure of woman relationships.

  Almost of necessity, Virginia Woolf’s women are far more psychologically presented than are her men. Just as self-analysis generally precedes an understanding of mankind, so women novelists have usually first to analyze and comprehend women before they can turn to men. Virginia Woolf is still too novitiate; she understands women with subtle variations, but she falls short in her analysis of men. Almost all are of the upper middle class; her milieu is not that of the Zoloesque servants or D. H. Lawrence gamekeepers. The great majority of her men are poets, like Jacob or Bernard, and as poets, she can justify their effeminate traits. She can infuse in them her comprehension of the poetic personality analyzed within herself. But her politicians, husbands or rejected lovers lack the complexity and the greatness of conception which she attempts in her women. The flaccidity of a character like Hugh Whitbread, a friend of Mrs. Dalloway’s, is as denotative of Virginia Woolf’s observations of men as of her ability to make them real. His personality is superficial and shallow. He has reached his perfection in his slightly absurd position of royal shoeshiner. Having acquired the protective shell of the perfect gentleman, he is utterly sterile within. All propensities for psychic interest are lacking; the mother-son Oedipus complex which would perhaps correlate in a study of man the Lesbianism which Virginia Woolf analyzes in women, becomes simply the unselfishness with which an English gentleman escorts his mother on his holidays. Thus “when his old mother wanted him to give up shooting or to take her to Bath he did it without a word.”56 The situation presents the potentialities for depth, but Hugh, typical of the class he represents, remains with “no heart, no brain”,57 courteous to women and self-satisfied.

  In her desire to create heroic women, Virginia Woolf frequently makes her men, in contrast, a negating force, a sterile element. In the conflict of man and woman, she reflects her ever-present problem of the struggle between the critic and the poet. Unlike most male poets, she conceives woman as the creative power in life and man as its destroyer. Where Mrs. Ramsay of “To the Lighthouse” is the great mother, the symbol of fertility, her husband suffers from feminine prejudice in Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Ramsay seemed “to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure, he said. … It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life—the drawing-room; behind the drawing-room the kitchen; above the kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond them the nurseries; they must be furnished, they must be filled with life.”58

  Woman is for her the genius of life. It is she who creates and satisfies the human need for a room, for a setting of rested fulfilment. All the incongruent shapes in the room, its people, its chairs, its reflecting mirrors, are given significance and design by the presence of a woman: “the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her.”59 With true artistry, Virginia Woolf attempts to make of such women, figures of completion. She doe
s not infuse them, like a social moralist, with ideals for converting mankind. The more masculine need to educate the world fails her. Where she can describe the haphazard irrationalities of their lives, of life itself, she is most successful. “ ‘Je n’enseigne poinct; je raconte.’ ”60 she quotes significantly from Montaigne. Her novels are thus freed from all desire to lay down a code of morals for the world. Ethics and determinism have given way to pure toleration. “ ‘I am very tolerant,’ ” says Bernard. “ ‘I am not a moralist. I have too great a sense of the shortness of life and its temptations to rule red lines’ ”.61 The innately lawless woman is discernible; oppressed herself by the codes of man-made ethics, Virginia Woolf can understand evil without desiring to reform it. In her novels, she seeks not to condemn or ameliorate the world, hut to remirror life, poetically, without pedantism. Like her own observation of Jane Austen, “She would not move one brick or blade of grass in a world which provides her with such exquisite delight.”62 Thus she satirizes the world reformers: the politicians, suffragists, blue stockings, and even social workers. She has as little taste for active politics as for active militarism; she is determined to leave them to others, preferably to men. The tremendous sacrifices which women make in their determination to reform the world, she describes negatingly in “Night and Day”. Mary, with all the propensities for a life of love and motherhood withers into an emancipating old maid with day dreams of the man she might have married. She goes to ruin because she has lost her femininity in liberating womanhoods. Almost certainly inspired by the Mary of “Pride and Prejudice”, she has the same faults, the terseness, the partial subversion of her femininity which Jane Austen gives her heroine, with the great exception that the nineteenth century woman, through reawakening womanhood, saves herself from spinsterhood. “It is sometimes a disadvantage to be so very guarded,” philosophizes Jane Austen, warning women against the danger of suppressing their womanly emotions. “If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him,” the opportunity of completing herself, “and it will be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark.”63 Diverted by political socialism, Mary’s development is hampered, and her affections unnaturally suppressed. She has sacrificed those mysterious charms with which Virginia Woolf endows her heroines, her women who are loved. Unbroken by life, they are the women who cling to their femininity, who live it rather than subvert it into propaganda. They are the great mothers like Mrs. Ramsay, or Mrs. Ambrose of “The Voyage Out”, the women bound to earth and symbolizing in themselves earth’s process. It is they, the women who stand in the room, who diffuse it with a life contingent upon their own, who are Virginia Woolf’s ideals, her great characters. Not the women who flee, who rebel or protest or dream at the window, but those who infuse the room with intellectual life through their deep understanding, and physical life through bearing children. Although she understands the stragglers and revolters, she revels in the women who are no longer distorted by a warrior attitude; the women who have “consumed all impediments and become incandescent.”64