Abstract
Virginia Woolf was clearly interested in the life and poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but almost no one has investigated the thematic connections between them. This chapter suggests that, in spite of her own atheism, Woolf pursued a fruitful engagement with Hopkins’ theological aesthetics, as worked out in his poetry. In particular, her dramatization of individual moments of revelation in Mrs. Dalloway follows the model set forth by Hopkins in his poems and theorized in his prose. Reading her authorial choices next to his reveals how much Woolf relied on Christian views of creation, gift, and transcendent experience.
Non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est. (“Not to be restrained by the greatest, but to be bounded by the smallest: that is divine.” Composed in 1640 as an epitaph for the tomb of Ignatius of Loyola, Friedrich Hölderlin later made it the epigraph to his 1799 novel, Hyperion [2008, 7].)
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Notes
- 1.
Woolf had one of only 750 copies printed of Bridges’ 1918 first edition. There were no further printings or editions until 1930. See Catherine Phillips, “Note on the Text” (2002, xxxix). In the second letter to Case, Woolf asks to have the book back once her friend is finished with it, “since I spent 12/6 on him and also haven’t yet made him out” (1975–1980, 2: 415). Perhaps it was never returned, for the volume is not listed in King and Miletic-Vejzovic’s list of the Woolfs’ library holdings.
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- 4.
Another important comparison would be the lives of the two artists: both were aesthetic visionaries from privileged social backgrounds, who struggled with depression, and so on. But in the interest of space, the present study will cover only their art.
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That said, there is a growing body of work on religious inheritance and spirituality in Woolf. Mark Gaipa situates her between spiritualism and materialism and does helpful work in placing her more complicated view of religion relative to her father’s fiercer agnosticism (2003). Christopher Knight also places Woolf’s view of religion in an in-between space: it registers “itself neither as an affirmation nor a negation, but rather as a vexation, wherein the religious convictions of the past are undercut by the doubts of the present, just as the doubts of the present are called into question by the convictions of the past” (2007, 43). Kristina Groover suggests that Mrs. Dalloway in particular be read in light of a “feminist theology according to which God is a relation that human beings choose to enact” (2011, 11). Stephanie Paulsell historicizes Woolf’s relation to religion, placing her writings in relation to the strains of religious thought and practice she would have known about, in her family and among friends and extended relatives (2017).
- 6.
For more on Inscape and Instress, see Hans Urs von Balthasar (1986, 365–366).
- 7.
On the individuality of each person’s inner life, Hopkins wrote: “When I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: What must it be to be someone else?). Nothing else in nature comes near…searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being” (2002b, 282).
- 8.
On Hopkins’ understanding of mystery, see also the important letter to Robert Bridges, from October 24, 1883 (2013, 2: 619–620).
- 9.
In many places, Hopkins emphasizes the fundamental Jesuit principle that humans have been made to give glory to God: “Why did God Create?…He meant the world to give him praise, reverence and service: to give him glory…. I was made for this, each one of us was made for this” (2002c, 290–291).
- 10.
All quotations from the poetry are taken from the Bridges edition of 1918.
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In this connection, it is worth noting the similarity between Hopkins’ convictions about trees, and those of Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway (“Men must not cut down trees. There is a God” [2005, 24]). By contrast, Sir William Bradshaw, with his theory of “proportion,” will seek to dominate by means of imposed abstractions.
- 13.
In the scene we opened with, Woolf was going over Bridges’ Hopkins manuscripts: presumably, this meant the hand-written copies of his poems, but it is also possible that she saw something of Hopkins’ theological thought, which comes out all over the place in the letters he wrote to his friend.
- 14.
Here and elsewhere, as many have remarked, Woolf’s imagination seems to run parallel to Henri Bergson’s theory of external time and internal duration. For Bergson’s distinction, see Time and Free Will (2001, 90–91); on the disputed question whether Virginia Woolf actually read Bergson, or merely converged with his theory accidentally, see Mary Ann Gillies (1996, 107–131, esp. 107–108).
- 15.
To emphasize the relativity of experience in these terms is to bring to mind Walter Pater’s aesthetic model in The Renaissance: in the “Introduction,” he states that “Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative” (1980, xix). In the famous “Conclusion,” Pater fills out the picture thus:
the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. (187–188)
As an influence on both Hopkins and Woolf, Pater could help explain some of their common elements. On Pater and Hopkins, see Lesley Higgins (1991); on Pater and Woolf, see John Beer (1993).
- 16.
In Hopkins, the Sonnets of Desolation provide notable examples of this kind of loneliness: for example, “To seem the stranger lies my lot.”
- 17.
On the novel’s Homeric register, see Molly Hoff (1999).
- 18.
Woolf tends to focus more on the problematic sort of response than Hopkins, perhaps partially because he had been advised by religious superiors to avoid a too-critical spirit. See Hopkins’ 1881 letter to a friend, in which he refuses to speak disparagingly of others’ poetic work for more than a couple of paragraphs: “However I must write no more criticism” (2013, 1: 478).
- 19.
The human urge to dominate the phenomena arises again and again in Woolf’s novel, for example in the recurrent echoing of clocks, whose metallic rings of sound seek to limit and control the temporal space of the day: “The leaden circles dissolved in the air” (2005, 47).
- 20.
On love in Mrs. Dalloway, see Blanche Gelfant (1966).
- 21.
This means putting aside, for example, the repeated questions Peter and Clarissa ask themselves about “being in love” (e.g. 2005, 11, 34, 43–45, 74, 170, 187), and the florid, almost allegorical dreams Peter and Septimus have about love (78–80, 144).
- 22.
Pater , like Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen, had given up his childhood faith and was thus self-consciously agnostic (Donoghue 1994, 95–97), while Woolf herself, raised without religion, was able to appreciate its associated phenomena more disinterestedly (Gaipa 2003, 2–3). Like Hopkins, she saw a place for the kind of reverie often attached to profound religious experience.
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Lindley, D. (2019). Woolf and Hopkins on the Revelatory Particular. 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_6
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