Virginia Woolf (15 page)

“The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes hand in hand with stupidity. There she sat staring at the fire as she had stared at the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending indecency, Jacob doubted whether he liked it in the raw. He had a violent reversion towards male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics; and was ready to turn with wrath upon whoever it was who had fashioned life thus.

“Then Florinda laid her hand upon his knee.

“After all, it was none of her fault. But the thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

“Any excuse, though serves a stupid woman. He told her his head ached.

“But when she looked at him, dumbly, half-guessing, half-understanding, apologising perhaps, anyhow saying as he had said, ‘It’s none of my fault’, straight and beautiful in body, her face like a shell within its cap, then he knew that cloisters and classics are no use whatever. The problem is insoluble.”
²

Acknowledging her womanhood, Virginia Woolf is neither abstract in her philosophy of life, nor intellectual in her aesthetics. Life and style are her two main paths of interest. Like the early
poetic philosophers, like Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne, she speculates, tormentedly, upon the riddle of the universe, conscious at times that questioning is useless. “At midnight … it would be foolish to vex the moor with questions—what? and why?”
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The emotional problems are inevitably expressed in surging rhythms. The phrases seem like the short lines of ballad verse, with deep caesuras. The writing is not intellectual, not philosophic, but ineffably poetic, emotionally feminine.

The delight in color and sound and smell, observed in “Orlando” and revealing Virginia Woolf’s sensuous reaction to life, is now given unrestrained freedom. She plays with the senses: “a
breadth of water gleamed
” she writes with intentional aural confusion. The noise and musical movement in nature she describes with rhythmic onomatopoeia:

“Up went the rooks and down again, rising in lesser numbers each time … The moss was soft; the tree-trunks spectral. Beyond them lay a silvery meadow. A breadth of water gleamed. Already the convolvulus moth was spinning over the flowers. Orange and purple, nasturtium and cherry pie, were washed into the twilight, but the tobacco plant and the passion flower, over which the great moth spun, were white as china. The rooks creaked their wings together on the tree-tops, and were settling down for sleep when, far off, a familiar sound shook and trembled—increased—fairly dinned in their ears—scared sleepy wings into the air again—the dinner bell at the house.”
⁴
With curious artistry, she combines the human senses in one sentence, heavily weighted with suggestion. The sensation of sight is stimulated in “orange and purple”, taste in “cherry pie”, “were washed” (sound) “into the twilight” (time), “but the tobacco plant” (smell) “over which the great moth spun” (visual motion), “were white” (a repetition of the sight stimulus) “as china” (the sensation of touch).

Typical of the self-assurance with which she has now abandoned herself to imagery, she revels in phrases like “scared sleepy wings”. She recalls Ruskin’s polemics as well as his own use of pathetic fallacies. She repeats the confusion of vague imagery, of conceits which violate reality, which Ruskin had condemned but could not resist. In a quasi-philosophic meditation, she describes religion and morals in short associative flights. Night becomes an elongated sigh, and duty, a voice piping in a thread. “The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their
interpretation of the day’s meaning. Then, less melodiously, dissenters of different sects issue a cantankerous emendation … But nowadays it is the thin voice of duty, piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel, that collects the largest multitudes, and night is nothing but a long-drawn sigh between hammer-strokes, a deep breath—you can hear it from an open window even in the heart of London.”
⁵

The old ardent justification of admired writers, marked in “The Voyage Out” appears once more, but with mature confidence. Virginia Woolf now makes merry over adulation. Marlowe becomes the symbol of the worshipped past; “detest your own age,” she burlesques Nick Greene.

“For example there is Mr. Masefield, there is Mr. Bennett. Stuff them into the flame of Marlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain. Don’t palter with the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one. … Useless to trust to the Victorians, who disembowel, or to the living, who are mere publicists.”
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In the serene, detached presentation of her early struggle, her maturity is affirmed. Conflict is no longer a destructive force in her creations. Though her impulses lie essentially in one direction, she can without “protesting or preaching” appreciate the other. The conflict between rhapsody and restraint is objectified: “I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them.” (a repetition of the Gibbon’s image and admiration in “The Voyage Out”). “I like words to be hard—such were Bonamy’s views, and they won him the hostility of those whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can’t forbear a shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature.”
⁷

Little is exposited in “Jacob’s Room”. Action, place, time and people are suggested impressionistically. There is a feminine delicacy of associations, a word, a repetition, which sets into motion the desired thoughts and more. The whole war is suggested in one line, almost obscured by its very simplicity. “ ‘The Kaiser’, the far-away voice remarked in Whitehall, ‘received me in audience.’ ”
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And later, the war breaks out, but as a distant echo. One sees it through the half-closed eyes of a poetic woman.

“ ‘The guns?’ said Betty Flanders, half asleep, getting out of bed and going to the window, which was decorated with a fringe of dark leaves.

“Not at this distance,’ she thought. ‘It is the sea.’

“Again, far away, she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets. There was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons fighting for their country. But were the chickens safe? Was that some one moving downstairs? Rebecca with the toothache? No. The nocturnal women were beating great carpets. Her hens shifted slightly on their perches.”
⁹

It is the war behind the front; the war which women heard, but kept their chickens safe and fed more sons.

Jacob’s death, sudden, unmotivated as are deaths in war, is only suggested by the desolation of his room, of his friend and his mother. It is the culmination; all of his existence is hurriedly recalled by his letters; in a description, repeated, of the room to which he had given life, his death in suggested with feminine artistry.

“ ‘He left everything just as it was,’ Bonamy marvelled. ‘Nothing arranged. All his letters strewn about for any one to read. What did he expect? Did he think he would come back?’ he mused, standing in the middle of Jacob’s room …

“Bonamy took up a bill for a hunting-crop.

‘That seems to be paid,’ he said.

“There were Sandra’s letters.

“Mrs. Durrant was taking a party to Greenwich.

“Lady Rocksbier hoped for the pleasure …

“Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though no one sits there.”
¹⁰

A wistful impression, this is more the living contrast than death itself.

The poetry “denied outlet” in women, now grows less and less constrained, and in “Mrs. Dalloway” knows little suppression. The Shelleyean relentless heaving of rhythmic verbs, “I die, I faint, I tremble, I expire”; the irresistible pressing forward to a culmination, is liberated here. The singing rhythms are inseparable from Virginia Woolf’s emotional reaction to life. Her integrity asserts itself; the bald sobriety dictated by the critic is denied. Rhyme which has fallen largely out of poetry is introduced into prose, and her writing becomes more rhythmically poetic than much of contemporary verse.

“So on a summer’s day waves collect, over-balance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying ‘that is all’ more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.”
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Waves and heavings of the consciousness are, however fitting, not the only themes she now adapts to her lyric, feminine prose. Speeches are sung, characters speak in musical cadences. Not a dramatic monologue or a poetic play, but like an operetta, one word, one phrase, one rhythm is repeated: “ ‘But, thank you, Lucy, oh, thank you,’ said Mrs. Dalloway, and thank you, thank you, she went on saying (sitting down on the sofa with her dress over her knees, her scissors, her silks), thank you, thank you, she went on saying in gratitude … ”
¹²
The lyrical fluidity suggests the sweep and graceful movement of the operatic stage.

Dialogue, however, is not abundant; realism, the sharp selectivity, demanded by a dramatist, is lacking. Virginia Woolf is lyrical, singing and receiving vague irrational impressions. “ ‘She was like a lily, Sally said, a lily by the side of a pool’ ”,
¹³
Or “She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth, Willie Titcomb was thinking.”
¹⁴
It is like the richly colored, dreamy conversation of “Salome”, a soliloquy of the consciousness, thought more than spoken. In silence, Peter Walsh remembers how he had wanted to marry Clarissa Dalloway, and in silence, she understands his thoughts.

“Of course I did, thought Peter;” in his desire to marry Clarissa; “it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I’ve ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall.”
¹⁵

The poetic swelling of emotions, the rhythmic surging of associations in the human mind, is artfully suggested by the style. With unusual structure, prose flows into poetry and long waves
of thoughts and illusions are set into graceful motion. “A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning into

ee um fah um so

foo swee too eem oo—

the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube Station, from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches singing

ee um fah um so

foo swee too eem oo,

and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.”
¹⁶

In turning to the world of the sub-conscious, Virginia Woolf finds fitting cause for hallucinations. The associative conceits of nature, loved by the romanticists and condemned by their critics, are permissible in the consciousness, and Mrs. Dalloway, feeling that another woman is crushing her, believes she can “hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul.”
¹⁷
The darkness of this underworld allows a vagueness of images which sunlight repels. Where earlier writers fell back upon dreams to absolve many impossible illusions, Virginia Woolf, like the psycho-analytic novelists, seeks out this dream world consciously. There “are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing.”
¹⁸
She still perceives the duality between fact and fancy, but in the dream-world, illusions become reality, justifying a haziness and extravagance otherwise absurd. “Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of roses, or rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.”
¹⁹
Heaped together, unobjectified, the very conceits satirized in “Orlando” are now allowed because they make no pretence at reality. They exist in trauma and there they are absolute. It is the indelible mark of her character, that, needing expression for such poetic fancies, Virginia Woolf seeks a form in which they are acceptable. Dreams are a refuge, a precaution. At all costs, poetry must find outlet.

The tradition that women think emotionally is embodied in Clarissa Dalloway. Her thoughts are a firework of ejaculations; of poetic visions and feminine ecstasy. “ ‘What a lark!’ ‘What a

plunge!’ ” she cries typically in the first page, her introduction: “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, ‘Musing among the vegetables?’—was that it?—‘I prefer men to cauliflowers’—was that it?”
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The logical procession of ideas, attributed to men, is foreign to Clarissa. She has flashes of intuition, of reminiscences, whose strong emotional appeal compels cadences and imagery. Lest she lose the common touch with prose, Virginia Woolf intercepts the phrases that threaten to grow metrical, with parenthetic prosaic remarks. Yet the rhythmic, bubbling talk is as typical of Virginia Woolf as it is of Mrs. Dalloway. She is a compound writer rather than a complex one; her thoughts are ordered in
ands
and
buts.
Her sentences are clever windings and turnings of gushing irrelevancies. The long lists observed in “Orlando” and reverberating here would prove the adage that women cannot select; all their observations must be aired.