Abstract
When in August 1924 Virginia Woolf considered Pepys for the new volume of The Common Reader she also noted in her Diary: ‘It strikes me, I must now read Pilgrim’s Progress’ (Diary, 2. 309). Like Pepys, Bunyan does not appear in either volume of The Common Reader, but Woolf’s critical enterprise is suffused with his spirit.1 In the early 1930s she reread The Pilgrim’s Progress as part of her programme of study for The Pargiters,2 which fed into her polemical attack on the patriarchal establishment in Three Guineas. In November 1900 Thoby Stephen, then an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, had presented his sister Virginia with an elegant 1776 Folio edition (with copper plates) of Foxe’s Protestant history.3 As Virginia Woolf assembled notes in the late 1930s for her ‘Common History’ — the projected literary history which she never completed — she could have observed that Bunyan had discovered for himself from reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs a past which promised him a new language and a voice. Bunyan used Foxe as many working men who felt themselves to be born and bred outside mainstream culture were to use The Pilgrim’s Progress: as an adjunct to the Bible, in which the reader might find some paradigm for personal history, some alternative cultural tradition.
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Notes
Margaret Olafson Thickstun, ‘From Christiana to Stand-fast: Subsuming the Feminine in The Pilgrim’s Progress’, SEL, 26 (1986): 439–53.
Cf. Kathleen M. Swaim, ‘Mercy and the Feminine Heroic in the Second Part of Pilgrim’s Progress’, SEL, 30 (1990): 386–409.
John R. Knott Jr., ‘“Thou must live upon my Word”: Bunyan and the Bible’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus (Oxford, 1988): 153–70, p. 153.
John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1641) [Book of Martyrs], III. 796: ‘This prison was within a Court where the Prebends chambers were, being a vault beneath the ground, and being before the window inclosed with a pale of height; by estimation, foure foot and a half, and distant from the same three foot, so that she looking from beneath, might onely see such as stood at the pale.... Her lying in that prison was onely upon a little short straw between a paire of stocks and a stone wall.’ This edition of Foxe carries the title by which the book was always known, and which will be used in this text: the Book of Martyrs.
For the conditions of Bunyan’s own imprisonment, see Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church 1628–1688 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 120–2.
Roger Pooley, ‘Grace Abounding and the New Sense of Self’, in Anne Laurence, W.R. Owens and Stuart Sim (eds), John Bunyan and his England 1628–88 (London and Ronceverte, 1990): 105–14.
John Bunyan, A Relation of My Imprisonment, in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1962), pp. 117–18.
John Brown, John Bunyan (1628–1688): His Life, Times and Work, revised Frank Mott Harrison (1928), pp. 114–17; see Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, p. 14.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), p. 98.
William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (1963), p. 178.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), p. 31.
John R. Knott, Jr., The Sword of the Spirit: Puritan Responses to the Bible (Chicago, 1980), p. 25.
Knott, The Sword of the Spirit, p. 6; Thomas Hyatt Luxton, ‘The Pilgrim’s Passive Progress: Luther and Bunyan on Talking and Doing, Word and Way’, ELH, 53 (1986): 73–98, p. 84.
Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience (1972), p. 210; Knott, The Sword of the Spirit, pp. 24, 29. Showalter, ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’, p. 129, notes the use of the same Biblical metaphor in feminist criticism. Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury, p. 22, connects Leonard Woolf’s Hebraism with a tradition of Evangelical Puritanism.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N.H. Keeble (Oxford, 1984), pp. 128, 277 n128
It is possible that Bunyan at some point read Sir Thomas Wyatt’s paraphrases of the Penitential Psalms (printed in 1549). If so he would have found in Wyatt’s linking stanzas for Psalm 38, a similar concealed reference to Coverdale 39. Rebholz believes that Wyatt used the Coverdale translation: Like as the pilgrim that in a long way. Fainting for heat, provoked by some wind. In some fresh shade lieth down at mids of day, So doth of David the wearied voice and mind. Take breath of sighs when he had sung this lay. Under such shade as sorrow hath assigned; And as the t’one still minds his voyage end, So doth the t’other to mercy still pretend. Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. by R. A. Rebholz (Harmondsworth, 1978), p. 206, my italics. Here Wyatt, like Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress, has separated the Psalmist from his own metaphor of the pilgrim: they are two distinct people, narrator and wayfarer, the dreamer and Christian. Wyatt sees the Psalmist’s burden as one of articulation.
Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artefacts (Berkeley, 1972), p. 240.
Deborah Cameron, Feminism and Linguistic Theory (1985), pp. 91–113. Adrienne Munich, ‘Notorious signs, feminist criticism and literary tradition’, in Greene and Kahn, Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism: 238–59, p. 252, observes: ‘Marginality empowers the feminist reader to prise open mythologies that govern patriarchal texts. A feminist critic may not write or even seek a woman’s language, but she can exile herself from language’s patrimony. Hence her own writing can establish a different bond with traditional texts.’ See also Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, on Woolf’s ‘desire to revise not woman’s language but woman’s relation to language’ (I. 230).
Elizabeth Mary Wright, The Life of Joseph Wright (1932), I. 20, 19, 26–8.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 187–8.
Hugh Latimer, Fruitful Sermons (London: Thomas Cotes, 1635). Woolf’s Notes are in Berg, XVI.
See N.H. Keeble, ‘“Take away preaching, and take away salvation”: Hugh Latimer, Protestantism and prose style’, in Neil Rhodes (ed.), English Renaissance Prose: new essays in criticism (Binghampton, NY: Centre for Medieval Texts and Studies, forthcoming 1997).
Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Post/Postructuralist Feminist Criticism: The Politics of Recuperation and Negotiation’, NLH, 22, 2 (1991): 465–90, p. 487, n4.
Letter to Mrs N. Senior, September 18, 1874, in C. Edmund Maurice, Life of Octavia Hill (1913), p. 308, quoted in Three Guineas, p. 185 n35. Marcus, ‘Thinking Back through Our Mothers’, p. 75, points to Woolf’s sense of herself as ‘redeemer’ and ‘deliverer’ of lost lives, but does not explore the Biblical implications of such language.
Martin Luther, Letter to Eoben Hess, March 29, 1523, in Werke, Weimar Edition, Briefwechsel, III. 50., quoted in Roland Mushat Frye, God, Man, and Satan (Princeton, 1960), p. 8.
V. Milo Kaufmann, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven, 1966), p. 133.
Mary Astell, The Christian Religion As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), p. 139
quoted in Florence M. Smith, Mary Astell (New York, 1916), p. 6. This passage was copied by Woolf into her Reading Notes, Berg, X.
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© 1997 Juliet Dusinberre
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Dusinberre, J. (1997). Bunyan and Virginia Woolf: A History and a Language of Their Own. In: Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25644-0_6
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