Abstract
Drawing on recent work on “emotional geographies” in the fields of geography and cultural studies, this chapter offers an account of rooms, memory and affect in Woolf’s unfinished memoir “A Sketch of the Past.” Zink reads Woolf’s memoir-writing in the troubled context of the late 1930s and early 1940s, a time when memory, private space and her readership were threatened by the imminence of war. The rooms in this fragmentary memoir are material spaces reconfigured imaginatively as loci of memory, mapping out a geo-history of the self, which not only anticipates Gaston Bachelard’s “topoanalysis” but also problematises his view of the house as benign space.
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Notes
- 1.
Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd edition, 1985, 64–159; hereafter referred to as “Sketch.”
- 2.
See diary entry of Saturday, 9 December 1939. The extent of Woolf’s knowledge of Freud before 1939 remains unclear. More recently, Gabrielle McIntire has argued that Woolf was much more familiar with Freud’s theories than critics have acknowledged but that her initial “ambivalence to psychoanalysis was so intense that she was willing to deny her knowledge of Freud’s writings openly” (164). In December 1939, however, Woolf admits to “gulping up” Freud and compares the effect of her autobiographical writing with that of psychoanalysis , as she had done in relation to the writing of To the Lighthouse (McIntire 164–5).
- 3.
Freud’s proviso is “that the organ of the mind has remained intact and that its tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation” (258).
- 4.
The Club started in 1920 on the initiative of Molly MacCarthy, Desmond MacCarthy’s wife, and “continued in various incarnations through 1956, with its original members including E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, David Garnett, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Saxon-Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Molly and Desmond MacCarthy, Adrian Stephen , and Leonard and Virginia Woolf” (McIntire 149).
- 5.
Ling Su-Hua, Julian Bell’s Chinese friend, “had written to Virginia that she was helplessly depressed by Japan’s invasion of China and her refugee life in the western province of Szechuan” (L6: 221, footnote).
- 6.
For more detailed discussions of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and her Chinese correspondent, see Selma Meyerowitz, “Virginia Woolf and Ling Su Hua: Literary and Artistic Correspondences” (Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 1982), and Patricia Laurence, “Hours in a Chinese Library: Re-reading Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury and Modernism” (Virginia Woolf: Art, Education, and Internationalism, 2008).
- 7.
Woolf seems to have felt the loss of her readership—“writing in a vacuum” (L6: 430)—more strongly than she had reason to (Snaith, Virginia Woolf 133). Despite the surge in public interest in newspapers due to the political situation in the last years of Woolf’s life, her books continued to sell well and be well received. The Years, in particular , became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.
- 8.
Youngjoo Son, for instance, maintains that in “Sketch,” “[t]he portrayal of domestic space as a place of maternal nurture and harmony […] is frequently disrupted” (58). Merry M. Pawlowski argues that the mother is largely distant or absent in “Sketch” and that “Woolf’s texts not only indict the father and brother basking in the public world of patriarchy; they indict the mother in the private house as well” (266).
- 9.
For a more detailed discussion of the significance of the Victorian study, see the previous chapter as well as Victoria Rosner’s Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life.
- 10.
As Woolf recalls, the tea-table consisted in “the round table in the middle […] supplemented by a small folding table” (MB 118). She attributes to the latter animistic qualities, writing that it “has followed [her], unwelcomed, even to Monks [sic] House” (MB 118).
- 11.
As Woolf records, on confessing her desire to be a writer to Lady Beatrice Thynne at the time, she was offered the opportunity to meet Andrew Lang, a journalist and man of letters, and was considered “excessively foolish” when she didn’t show enough interest in the prospect (MB 157).
- 12.
Linking the condemnation of patriarchy in Three Guineas and the memoir, Merry M. Pawlowski reads the two texts conjointly, arguing that “[e]ach work has the power to interanimate and build a context for the other while demonstrating Woolf’s increasing personal commitment to social change” (258).
- 13.
For a lengthy discussion of the role of photography in the text and the meaning of the absent photographs, see Maggie Humm , “Memory, Photography, and Modernism: The ‘dead bodies and ruined houses’ of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.” As Maggie Humms points out, Woolf adopts the same setting (home ) “with similar intent” in her 1940 essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air-Raid,” discussed in more detail in the following section (651).
- 14.
According to David Bradshaw, Woolf specifically echoes the image used by the Foreign Secretary (1905–16) Sir Edward Grey in August 1914 when he declared: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime” (TL 191, editor’s note).
- 15.
The diary entry of 7 June 1940 echoes the symbolic conjunction between war, darkness and death conveyed in this passage: “Question of suicide seriously debated […] in the gradually darkening room. At last no light at all. This was symbolic” (D5: 292).
- 16.
“The gradual dissolution of everything” is one of the ideas featuring in the “Outline” of “Time Passes” in the manuscript (TL 191, editor’s note).
- 17.
I am drawing inspiration from Hermione Lee’s suggestive title imagery in her biography of Woolf. Chapter thirty-eight spanning the years 1937 (marked by the death of Julian Bell in the Spanish war) until the outbreak of war in September 1939 is entitled “Waiting,” followed by “War” (chapter thirty-nine).
- 18.
At the time, suicide was seriously envisaged not only by the Woolfs but also by other people in their circle (Lee , Virginia Woolf 730).
- 19.
The letter and the diary entry are both cited by Stuart N. Clarke as part of the genesis of the text in The Essays of Virginia Woolf Vol.6: 1933 to 1941, 246.
- 20.
See Susan M. Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City, 154.
- 21.
Stonebridge draws on Freud’s image of anxiety as “protect[ing] its subject against fright” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Penguin, 1984, 292).
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Zink, S. (2018). Rooms of Memory: “A Sketch of the Past”. In: Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71909-2_8
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