Short Description:
Virginia Woolf is a towering figure of the modern novel. She is also a highly influential and accomplished essayist and philosopher, whose arguments continue to be influential to feminism, queer studies, medical humanities, and critiques of militarism, imperialism, and industrialized capitalism to the present day. This course will do a deep dive into Woolf's fiction and nonfiction, from her early short stories to major novels like Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, as well as long nonfiction essays, including A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. Attention will be paid to Woolf's engagement with major historical events (the two World Wars, the advent of women's suffrage, and colonialism/Empire) as well as her literary milieu (the Bloomsbury movement). Various critical lenses for reading Woolf's writing will be introduced at appropriate moments, including feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis, and medical humanities scholarship, especially linked to Woolf's representations of mental illness (depression, bipolar disorder).
Longer Introduction:
Virginia Woolf is one of the central figures in early 20th-century writing. Alongside and in dialogue with writers like James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, she helped pioneer new styles and forms for modern fiction – which today we think of as the modernist style. She was a member of an important intellectual movement in London, referred to as the Bloomsbury Group. While we’ll be zooming in on Woolf throughout the fall, we’ll also acknowledge and engage with her interlocutors, including the authors mentioned above as well as figures like T.S. Eliot, Clive Bell, her sister Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, Vita Sackville-West, Radclyffe Hall, and many others. Woolf, like all great writers, was part of a rich and vibrant social network – people she knew in person and people she interacted with in print.
Indeed, most people teaching courses like this these days would opt towards a period focus (“Modernism”) rather than a single author focus. However, I like the single-author focus because it might allow us to get beneath the surface – to develop a rich understanding of what a particular author was able to accomplish over the course of her career. We can also follow her evolution and transformation over time, including more difficult and experimental works as well as the big ‘hits’. For students, one advantage of reading lesser-known materials alongside canonical works is that you might find space to make critical interventions that could lead to publication more easily. Thousands of articles have been published on Mrs. Dalloway – and it can be difficult to find an original angle – but not as many have been published on Woolf’s short essay engaging with British imperialism published just before that novel, “Thunder at Wembley.” I’ll be encouraging you to look for your own threads and connections as we explore secondary materials alongside the masterpieces.
Woolf’s personal life and the biographical elements that show up in her fiction are of considerable interest to us today – as is well-known, both Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell were survivors of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of step-brothers. She lost her mother when she was very young, and continued to dwell on the meaning of that loss in various ways throughout her career (and especially in To the Lighthouse). She lost a brother she was quite close to to typhoid after a family trip to Greece in her 20s; a version of that story of loss is represented in The Voyage Out and Jacob’s Room. She had life-long struggles with depression (based on how her symptoms were described by friends and family, she was also possibly bipolar), which are reflected in many of her novels, and had an extremely fraught and frustrating relationship with psychiatric treatment (which was pretty hopeless at the time). All of these are topics that might feel quite current – and there is a considerable wealth of health humanities scholarship as well as scholarship in the trauma studies field that can be brought to bear on her work.
→ Research questions/threads for students to consider: How might health humanities and medical humanities scholarship help us understand the powerful representations of mental illness in Woolf’s work? How do we understand the representation of sexual assault and sexual harassment in Woolf’s work?
Virginia Woolf was married to a man throughout much of her adult life, but also had an intense relationship with a woman in the 1920s, Vita Sackville-West, that had a marked impact on her writing and inspired the 1929 novel Orlando. However, queer themes and traces of same-sex desire are evident throughout her fiction; we see them in writings going as far back as the 1910s (“Kew Gardens”). It’s certainly also important in Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s satirical novel Orlando is also famously a novel where the protagonist changes gender part-way through, and it can arguably be read as a “trans” novel (those of you who were in the Theories of LSJ class last spring already saw a version of this). At the end of her essay A Room of One’s Own, Woolf talked about an idea she called “the androgynous mind” – and while that term seems a little dated, I’ve grown interested in aspects of Woolf’s writing that seem, if not trans, at least non-binary.
→ Research question/thread for students: Is there a non-binary mind at work in Woolf? (Perhaps we can start by taking a look at the curiously un-gendered narrator of “The Mark on the Wall” in our discussion today!) How do we balance the various feminist and queer threads in Woolf’s work?
Woolf on Empire and Industrial Capitalism. Both Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf were critical of British Imperialism and industrialized capitalism. Leonard Woolf had personal experience of the Empire – as a young man (before marriage), he had a job in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), working for the British colonial government there. He published a novel set in Sri Lanka. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Leonard was an active columnist in various serious magazines of public affairs, and he followed the rise of anti-colonial political movements in India and elsewhere quite closely. Both Woolfs also identified as socialists, though Leonard Woolf’s politics are much more specifically articulated than Virginia’s. (A good place to explore Woolf’s ideas about economics might be her essay Three Guineas, which we’ll read together later in the semester.) My own sense is that Woolf’s critique of the harms of capitalism are always operating at least partly through her feminism: she always centers women in her analysis. References to British colonialism appear throughout Woolf’s fictions, including especially in Mrs. Dalloway, The Voyage Out, and The Years. She also published essays like “Thunder at Wembley” that revealed in somewhat more direct ways her disgust at the sense of unexamined superiority and triumphalism the fact of the Empire led to in cultural terms within England. That said, unlike Leonard or their friend E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf did not travel outside of Europe and had little direct engagement with colonized people or people of color.
We should acknowledge that there are some weird and troubling representations of racialized others in Woolf’s fiction. These tend to be few and far between, but they are there. We’ll definitely want to talk about this issue in Orlando. For me, the presence of these moments doesn’t make me think any less of Woolf’s extraordinary achievements as a writer, but I’m not interested in pretending these moments aren’t there either.
→ Research questions/threads for students: How do we handle the complex and sometimes problematic accounts of cultural and racial difference in Woolf’s novels? Is there a general critique of British imperialism in her work? What role should Leonard Woolf play in our account of Virginia Woolf’s politics?
The Hogarth Press. One unique feature of Woolf’s career is her partnership with Leonard Woolf in creating and operating the Hogarth Press. In 1917, they bought a printing press, which they installed in their dining room. They started producing small pamphlets (including a pair of short stories, one by Leonard and one by Virginia) in July 1917. The press became a more serious business in the mid-1920s, and while it started as a hobby, some of the titles they published would become quite successful. Over time, they would print several of Virginia’s important experimental novels, including Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway. They also published the first standalone edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land [the poem as such was first published in The Criterion magazine in 1922]. One theory worth considering is whether independence from the commercial constraints of publishing with an established house might have been a benefit in Woolf’s growth as a writer. Independent from the judgment of an established professional editor might also have been helpful.
While I don’t expect to go very deeply into the history of the Hogarth Press in this class, I do think it will be helpful and important to pay attention to the publication venues where Woolf was publishing her stories, novels and essays.
→ Research question/thread for students: What role did the Hogarth Press play in the dissemination of British modernism? What role did it play in enabling the particular trajectory of Woolf’s career (especially in the 1920s)?
Woolf, Feminist Critique, and the limits of Social-Justice Oriented Reading. As you can tell, I tend to be very attuned to issues of social justice and the material world. I’m interested in how Woolf’s lack of a college education – which was clearly gender-related – influenced her later thinking about women and higher education. I’m also interested in feminist and queer interventions in all of her writings. However, there are other modes of reading we’ll also want to employ in this class – something I think of as allowing ourselves to experience the pleasure of the text. Alongside all of the critiques, Woolf was also an exceptional storyteller and visionary thinker, someone looking not just at the material world, but a kind of spiritual mesh or framework that existed beyond that world.
Here’s a passage from her diary as she was writing Mrs. Dalloway (which she was calling The Hours until quite late in the process) that speaks to that:
One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No, I think not. In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense-- But here I may be posting …. Am I writing The Hours from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it. It’s a question though of these characters. People, like Arnold Bennett [an established novelist and critic], say I can’t create, or didn’t in [Jacob’s Room] …. I daresay it’s true, however, that I haven’t that ‘reality’ gift. I unsubstantiated, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality--its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself? (Virginia Woolf’s Diaries, Volume 2. June 19, 1923)
This is a very rich passage that brings up quite a bit that we’ll probably want to save for when we discuss Mrs. Dalloway later in the term (one important topic is mental illness, which she alludes to when she talks about the “mad part” of her mind). Here, I’m most interested in two different kinds of tensions, one of them in the sentence where she says, “I want to criticize the social system and to show it at work” and the other at the end – where she doubts her own ability to “convey the true reality.” To my mind, what she’s grappling with is her goal – is the goal to use fiction to make an ideological argument or to prove a point to one’s critics, or is it to “convey the true reality” of human beings in the world separate from whatever critics might think (including feminist or materialist/socialist critics) ? Is there something in the “true reality” shown in serious works of literary fiction that transcends arguments and critiques?