Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  37. The Earlier Letters of Gertrude Bell, collected and edited by Elsa Richmond, p-18.

  38. The question of chastity, both of mind and body, is of the greatest interest and complexity. The Victorian, Edwardian and much of the Fifth Georgian conception of chastity was based, to go no further back, upon the words of St Paul. To understand their meaning we should have to understand his psychology and environment — no light task in view of his frequent obscurity and the lack of biographical material. From internal evidence, it seems clear that he was a poet and a prophet, but lacked logical power, and was without that psychological training which forces even the least poetic or prophetic nowadays to subject their personal emotions to scrutiny. Thus his famous pronouncement on the matter of veils, upon which the theory of women’s chastity seems to be based, is susceptible to criticism from several angles. In the Letter to the Corinthians his argument that a woman must be veiled when she prays or prophesies is based upon the assumption that to be unveiled ‘is one and the same thing as if she were shaven.’ That assumption granted, we must ask next: What shame is there in being shaven? Instead of replying, St Paul proceeds to assert, ‘For a man indeed ought not to have his head veiled, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God’: from which it appears that it is not being shaven in itself that is wrong; but to be a woman and to be shaven. It is wrong, it appears, for the woman because ‘the woman is the glory of the man.’ If St Paul had said openly that he liked the look of women’s long hair many of us would have agreed with him, and thought the better of him for saying so. But other reasons appeared to him preferable, as appears from his next remark: ‘For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man; for neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man: for this cause ought the woman to have a sign of authority on her head, because of the angels.’ What view the angels took of long hair we have no means of knowing; and St Paul himself seems to have been doubtful of their support or he would not think it necessary to drag in the familiar accomplice nature. ‘Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a dishonour to him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering. But if any man seemeth to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God.’ The argument from nature may seem to us susceptible of amendment; nature, when allied with financial advantage, is seldom of divine origin; but if the basis of the argument is shifty, the conclusion is firm. ‘Let the women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but let them be in subjection, as also saith the law.’ Having thus invoked the familiar but always suspect trinity of accomplices, Angels, nature and law, to support his personal opinion, St Paul reaches the conclusion which has been looming unmistakably ahead of us: ‘And if they would learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home: for it is shameful for a woman to speak in the church.’ The nature of that ‘shame’, which is closely connected with chastity has, as the letter proceeds, been considerably alloyed. For it is obviously compounded of certain sexual and personal prejudices. St Paul, it is obvious, was not only a bachelor (for his relations with Lydia see Renan, Saint Paul, . ‘Est-il cependant absolument impossible que Paul ait contracté avec cette soeur une union plus intime? On ne saurait l’affirmer’); and, like many bachelors, suspicious of the other sex; but a poet and like many poets preferred to prophesy himself rather than to listen to the prophecies of others. Also he was of the virile or dominant type, so familiar at present in Germany, for whose gratification a subject race or sex is essential. Chastity then as defined by St Paul is seen to be a complex conception, based upon the love of long hair; the love of subjection; the love of an audience; the love of laying down the law, and, subconsciously, upon a very strong and natural desire that the woman’s mind and body shall be reserved for the use of one man and one only. Such a conception when supported by the Angels, nature, law, custom and the Church, and enforced by a sex with a strong personal interest to enforce it, and the economic means, was of undoubted power. The grip of its white if skeleton fingers can be found upon whatever page of history we open from St Paul to Gertrude Bell. Chastity was invoked to prevent her from studying medicine; from painting from the nude; from reading Shakespeare; from playing in orchestras; from walking down Bond Street alone. In 1848 it was ‘an unpardonable solecism’ for the daughters of a gardener to drive down Regent Street in a hansom cab (Paxton and the Bachelor Duke, by Violet Markham, ); that solecism became a crime, of what magnitude theologians must decide, if the flaps were left open. In the beginning of the present century the daughter of an ironmaster (for let us not flout distinctions said today to be of prime importance), Sir Hugh Bell, had ‘reached the age of 27 and married without ever having walked alone down Piccadilly . . . Gertrude, of course, would never have dreamt of doing that . . .’ The West End was the contaminated area. ‘It was one’s own class that was taboo; . . .’ (The Earlier Letters of Gertrude Bell, collected and edited by Elsa Richmond, p-18.) But the complexities and inconsistencies of chastity were such that the same girl who had to be veiled, i.e. accompanied by a male or a maid, in Piccadilly, could visit Whitechapel, or Seven Dials, then haunts of vice and disease, alone and with her parents’ approval. This anomaly did not altogether escape comment. Thus Charles Kingsley as a boy exclaimed: ‘. . . and the girls have their heads crammed full of schools, and district visiting, and baby linen, and penny clubs. Confound!!! and going about among the most abominable scenes of filth and wretchedness, and indecency to visit the poor and read the Bible to them. My own mother says that the places they go into are fit for no girl to see, and that they should not know such things exist.’ (Charles Kingsley, by Margaret Farrand Thorp, .) Mrs Kingsley, however, was exceptional. Most of the daughters of educated men saw such ‘abominable scenes’, and knew that such things existed. That they concealed their knowledge, is probable; what effect that concealment had psychologically it is impossible here to inquire. But that chastity, whether real or imposed, was an immense power, whether good or bad, it is impossible to doubt. Even today it is probable that a woman has to fight a psychological battle of some severity with the ghost of St Paul, before she can have intercourse with a man other than her husband. Not only was the social stigma strongly exerted on behalf of chastity, but the Bastardy Act did its utmost to impose chastity by financial pressure. Until women had the vote in 1918, ‘the Bastardy Act of 1872 fixed the sum of 5s. a week as the maximum which a father, whatever his wealth, could be made to pay towards the maintenance of his child.’ (Josephine Butler, by M. G. Fawcett and E. M. Turner, note, .) Now that St Paul and many of his apostles have been unveiled themselves by modern science chastity has undergone considerable revision. Yet there is said to be a reaction in favour of some degree of chastity for both sexes. This is partly due to economic causes; the protection of chastity by maids is an expensive item in the bourgeois budget. The psychological argument in favour of chastity is well expressed by Mr Upton Sinclair: ‘Nowadays we hear a great deal about mental troubles caused by sex repression; it is the mood of the moment. We do not hear anything about the complexes which may be caused by sex indulgence. But my observation has been that those who permit themselves to follow every sexual impulse are quite as miserable as those who repress every sexual impulse. I remember a class-mate in College; I said to him: “Did it ever occur to you to stop and look at your own mind? Everything that comes to you is turned into sex.” He looked surprised, and I saw that it was a new idea to him; he thought it over, and said: “I guess you are right.”’ (Candid Reminiscences, by Upton Sinclair, .) Further illustration is supplied by the following anecdote: ‘In the splendid library of Columbia University were treasures of beauty, costly volumes of engravings, and in my usual greedy fashion I went at these, intending to learn all there was to know about Renaissance art in a week or two. But I found myself overwhelmed by this mass of nakedness; my senses reeled, and I had to quit.’ (op. cit., p-3.)

  39. T
he translation here used is by Sir Richard Jebb (Sophocles, the Plays and Fragments, with critical notes, commentary and translation, in English prose). It is impossible to judge any book from a translation, yet even when thus read The Antigone is clearly one of the great masterpieces of dramatic literature. Nevertheless, it could undoubtedly be made, if necessary, into anti-Fascist propaganda. Antigone herself could be transformed either into Mrs Pankhurst, who broke a window and was imprisoned in Holloway; or into Frau Pommer, the wife of a Prussian mines official at Essen, who said: ‘“The thorn of hatred has been driven deep enough into the people by the religious conflicts, and it is high time that the men of today disappeared.” . . . She has been arrested and is to be tried on a charge of insulting and slandering the State and the Nazi movement.’ (The Times, 12 August 1935.) Antigone’s crime was of much the same nature and was punished in much the same way. Her words, ‘See what I suffer, and from whom, because I feared to cast away the fear of heaven! . . . And what law of heaven have I transgressed? Why, hapless one, should I look to the gods any more — what ally should I invoke — when by piety I have earned the name of impious?’ could be spoken either by Mrs Pankhurst, or by Frau Pommer; and are certainly topical. Creon, again, who ‘thrust the children of the sunlight to the shades, and ruthlessly lodged a living soul in the grave’; who held that ‘disobedience is the worst of evils’, and that ‘whomsoever the city may appoint, that man must be obeyed, in little things and great, in just things and unjust’ is typical of certain politicians in the past, and of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini in the present. But though it is easy to squeeze these characters into up-to-date dress, it is impossible to keep them there. They suggest too much; when the curtain falls we sympathize, it may be noted, even with Creon himself. This result, to the propagandist undesirable, would seem to be due to the fact that Sophocles (even in a translation) uses freely all the faculties that can be possessed by a writer; and suggests, therefore, that if we use art to propagate political opinions, we must force the artist to clip and cabin his gift to do us a cheap and passing service. Literature will suffer the same mutilation that the mule has suffered; and there will be no more horses.

  40. The five words of Antigone are: ’Tis not my nature to join in hating, but in loving. (Antigone, line 523, Jebb.) To which Creon replied: ‘Pass, then, to the world of the dead, and, if thou must needs love, love them. While I live, no woman shall rule me.’

  41. Even at a time of great political stress like the present it is remarkable how much criticism is still bestowed upon women. The announcement, ‘A shrewd, witty and provocative study of modern woman’, appears on an average three times yearly in publishers’ lists. The author, often a doctor of letters, is invariably of the male sex; and ‘to mere man’, as the blurb puts it (see Times Lit. Sup., 12 March 1938), ‘this book will be an eye-opener.’

  Notes and references: Three

  1. It is to be hoped that some methodical person has made a collection of the various manifestos and questionnaires issued broadcast during the years 1936-7. Private people of no political training were invited to sign appeals asking their own and foreign governments to change their policy; artists were asked to fill up forms stating the proper relations of the artist to the State, to religion, to morality; pledges were required that the writer should use English grammatically and avoid vulgar expressions; and dreamers were invited to analyse their dreams. By way of inducement it was generally proposed to publish the results in the daily or weekly Press. What effect this inquisition has had upon governments it is for the politician to say. Upon literature, since the output of books is unstaunched, and grammar would seem to be neither better nor worse, the effect is problematical. But the inquisition is of great psychological and social interest. Presumably it originated in the state of mind suggested by Dean Inge (The Rickman Godlee Lecture, reported in The Times, 23 November 1937), ‘whether in our own interests we were moving in the right direction. If we went on as we were doing now, would the man of the future be superior to us or not? . . . Thoughtful people were beginning to realize that before congratulating ourselves on moving fast we ought to have some idea where we were moving to’: a general self-dissatisfaction and desire ‘to live differently’. It also points, indirectly, to the death of the Siren, that much ridiculed and often upper-class lady who by keeping open house for the aristocracy, plutocracy, intelligentsia, ignorantsia, etc., tried to provide all classes with a talking-ground or scratching-post where they could rub up minds, manners, and morals more privately, and perhaps as usefully. The part that the Siren played in promoting culture and intellectual liberty in the eighteenth century is held by historians to be of some importance. Even in our own day she had her uses. Witness W. B. Yeats— ‘How often I have wished that he [Synge] might live long enough to enjoy that communion with idle, charming, cultivated women which Balzac in one of his dedications calls “the chief consolation of genius”!’ (Dramatis Personae, W. B. Yeats, .) Lady St Helier who, as Lady Jeune, preserved the eighteenth-century tradition, informs us, however, that ‘Plovers’ eggs at 2s. 6d. apiece, forced strawberries, early asparagus, petits poussins . . . are now considered almost a necessity by anyone aspiring to give a good dinner’ (1909); and her remark that the reception day was ‘very fatiguing . . . how exhausted I felt when half-past seven came, and how gladly at eight o’clock I sat down to a peaceful tête-à-tête dinner with my husband!’ (Memories of Fifty Years, by Lady St Helier, p, 5, 182) may explain why such houses are shut, why such hostesses are dead, and why therefore the intelligentsia, the ignorantsia, the aristocracy, the bureaucracy, the bourgeoisie, etc., are driven (unless somebody will revive that society on an economic basis) to do their talking in public. But in view of the multitude of manifestos and questionnaires now in circulation it would be foolish to suggest another into the minds and motives of the Inquisitors.

  2. ‘He did begin however on 13 May (1844) to lecture weekly at Queen’s College which Maurice and other professors at King’s had established a year before, primarily for the examination and training of governesses. Kingsley was ready to share in this unpopular task because he believed in the higher education of women.’ (Charles Kingsley, by Margaret Farrand Thorp, .)

  3. The French, as the above quotation shows, are as active as the English in issuing manifestos. That the French, who refuse to allow the women of France to vote, and still inflict upon them laws whose almost medieval severity can be studied in The Position of Women in Contemporary France, by Frances Clark, should appeal to English women to help them to protect liberty and culture must cause surprise.

  4. Strict accuracy, here slightly in conflict with rhythm and euphony, requires the word ‘port’. A photograph in the daily Press of ‘Dons in a Senior Common Room after dinner’ (1937) showed ‘a railed trolley in which the port decanter travels across a gap between diners at the fireplace, and thus continues its round without passing against the sun’. Another picture shows the ‘sconce’ cup in use. ‘This old Oxford custom ordains that mention of certain subjects in Hall shall be punished by the offender drinking three pints of beer at one draught . . .’ Such examples are by themselves enough to prove how impossible it is for a woman’s pen to describe life at a man’s college without committing some unpardonable solecism. But the gentlemen whose customs are often, it is to be feared, travestied, will extend their indulgence when they reflect that the female novelist, however reverent in intention, works under grave physical drawbacks. Should she wish, for example, to describe a Feast at Trinity, Cambridge, she has to ‘listen through the peephole in the room of Mrs Butler (the Master’s wife) to the speeches taking place at the Feast which was held in Trinity College’. Miss Haldane’s observation was made in 1907, when she reflected that ‘The whole surroundings seemed medieval.’ (From One Century to Another, by E. Haldane, .)

  5. According to Whitaker there is a Royal Society of Literature and also the British Academy, both presumably, since they have offices and officers, official bodies, but
what their powers are it is impossible to say, since if Whitaker had not vouched for their existence it would scarcely have been suspected.

  6. Women were apparently excluded from the British Museum Reading-Room in the eighteenth century. Thus: ‘Miss Chudleigh solicits permission to be received into the reading-room. The only female student who as yet has honoured us was Mrs Macaulay; and your Lordship may recollect what an untoward event offended her delicacy.’ (Daniel Wray to Lord Harwicke, 22 October 1768. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, vol. I, .) The editor adds in a footnote: ‘This alludes to the indelicacy of a gentleman there, in Mrs Macaulay’s presence; of which the particulars will not bear to be repeated.’

  7. The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs M. O. W. Oliphant, arranged and edited by Mrs Harry Coghill. Mrs Oliphant (1825-97) ‘lived in perpetual embarrassment owing to her undertaking education and maintenance of her widowed brother’s children in addition to her own two sons . . .’ (Dictionary of National Biography.)

  8. Macaulay’s History of England, vol. III, (standard edition).

  9. Mr Littlewood, until recently dramatic critic of the Morning Post, described the condition of Journalism at Present at a dinner given in his honour, 6 December 1937. Mr Littlewood said: ‘that he had in season and out of season fought for more space for the theatre in the columns of the London daily papers. It was Fleet Street where, between eleven and half-past twelve, not to mention before and after, thousands of beautiful words and thoughts were systematically massacred. It had been his lot for at least two out of his four decades to return to that shambles every night with the sure and certain prospect of being told that the paper was already full with important news, and that there was no room for any sanguinary stuff about the theatre. It had been his luck to wake up the next morning to find himself answerable for the mangled remains of what was once a good notice . . . It was not the fault of the men in the office. Some of them put the blue pencil through with tears in their eyes. The real culprit was that huge public who knew nothing about the theatre and could not be expected to care.’ The Times, 6 December 1937.