Abstract
The essays in this collection take up a challenge posed by Virginia Woolf herself: how to understand her persistent use of religious language, her representation of deeply mysterious human experiences, and her recurrent questions about life’s meaning in light of her sharply critical attitude toward religion. These interdisciplinary essays examine Woolf’s work as she reframes and reclaims the spiritual in unexpected forms, striving to find new language for those numinous experiences that remain after the death of God has been pronounced.
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Notes
- 1.
As a number of critics have noted, the Claphamite evangelicals of Leslie Stephen’s upbringing and the Bloomsbury circle of intellectuals shared a number of qualities: a rigorous work ethic, a reformist sensibility, and a sense of themselves as a rarefied elect. See Annan (1984, 159–161); Lee (1996, 54); Pecora (2006, 165–69); and Taylor (2007, 405–406).
- 2.
To cite a few examples: In The Voyage Out, Helen Ambrose worries that her children’s nursemaid will encourage them to pray, saying that she “would rather my children told lies” ([1915] 1948, 27). In Mrs. Dalloway , Clarissa frets over the tutor Miss Kilman’s religious influence on her daughter Elizabeth, calling the thought of them praying together “nauseating” ([1925] 1981, 117). Miss Kilman, whose self-pity, anger, and frustrated desire are thinly veiled by her religious zealotry, represents one of Woolf’s most scathing portraits. In her letters, Woolf inveighs against the “self conceit of Christians” and the “arrogance and monopoly of Christianity” (1977–1980, 4: 442, 83). For a thoughtful study of Woolf’s representations of clergy, see de Gay (2009).
- 3.
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler writes that the “suspect coherence” of narrative “may foreclose an ethical resource—namely, an acceptance of the limits of knowability in oneself and others. To hold a person accountable for his or her life in narrative form may even be to require a falsification of that life…we may be preferring the seamlessness of the story to something we might tentatively call the truth of the person, a truth that…might well become more clear in moments of interruption, stoppage, open-endedness—in enigmatic articulations that cannot easily be translated into narrative form” (2003, 63–64). Butler offers a rather apt description of Woolf’s vernacular, which is so markedly characterized by “moments of interruption, stoppage, open-endedness” in the interest of telling the “truth” about her characters.
- 4.
- 5.
Throughout this essay, I use terms such as religious, spiritual, sacred, mysterious, or numinous more or less interchangeably. Following the example of religion scholar Ann Taves, I am using these as first-order experiential terms: that is, they are defined by the person having an experience she deems as “special” or “set apart,” rather than by an outside authority who categorizes an experience as religious or spiritual based on pre-defined (second-order) terms. This shift in language allows a recalibration of religious terminology and enables analysis of a wide range of experiences that may be “deemed religious” or otherwise “special” by the individuals experiencing them.
- 6.
Although Woolf was not Christian, Christianity of course remained the dominant religion of English heritage and culture up to and including Woolf’s lifetime. As Jane de Gay writes, “Woolf argued with [Christianity ] because it was both an integral part of the literary, artistic, and architectural heritage of England, and a live social and political force to be reckoned with” (2018, 2). For the most part, the essays collected here reflect Woolf’s “argument” with Christianity either directly or obliquely. At the same time, Woolf and other modernists were developing an increasingly sophisticated awareness of other religious and spiritual traditions, and a limited number of studies have examined Woolf’s work in conjunction with eastern religious influences; see, for example, Banerjee (2016) and Kohn (2010).
- 7.
For a more extensive discussion, see my Introduction to Things of the Spirit: Women Writers Constructing Spiritualities (2004).
- 8.
In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf writes, “Then one day walking around Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse ; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another….my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked” (1985, 81). Hermione Lee writes that while Woolf was living at Monk’s House in Sussex, “every afternoon, in all weathers, she would walk with the dog, up on the Downs or along the river. Local people got used to the sight of her: in their eyes, an eccentric, solitary figure, shabbily dressed and talking to herself” (1996, 427).
- 9.
As Matthew Mutter argues, the notion that modernism introduced a fundamental secularism takes for granted a series of reductive binaries between secularism and religion. These binaries are based on a “caricature” of religion, Mutter argues; likewise, they present a reductive view of secularism, which, like religion, has its own methods, assumptions, and “imaginaries” (2017, 4). For an essential critical discussion of modernism and secularism, see also Lewis (2010).
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Groover, K.K. (2019). Introduction—Desire Lines: The Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf. In: Groover, K. (eds) Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32568-8_1
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