Abstract
Much of Virginia Woolf’s reputation as one of the half dozen greatest prose writers of this century rests upon the depth with which she was able to render the struggle of personal destinies against time and death, within the context of society and history. Her persistent novelistic concerns were how to realize one’s being in the midst of the massive structures of family, class, nation and era. She used the themes of love and marriage, premature death, war, madness and suicide, and exploited radical transformations of time, place, consciousness, even sexual gender, to serve this preoccupation. At the heart of Woolf’s literary metaphysics is a three-fold reality composed of the interaction of the natural world, the social context, and individual experience, which interweaves the brute things of this world with men and women in the world. Her characters’ ultimate aim is almost always the achievement of an ordered wholeness; Woolf projects that attempt at integration onto the inadequate or disintegrating reality (society, culture, history) around them. Unlike more conventional novelists, she does not place her characters within a societal soup tureen to observe them simmering. Rather, Woolf attempts to retrieve society and culture, time and history, in and through the human being. Thus, she is an unusual but profoundly historical writer.
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Notes
Others who have called attention to Woolf’s constant awareness of the historical dimension include Werner J. Deiman, ‘History, Pattern and Continuity in Virginia Woolf,’ Contemporary Literature 15, No. 1 (Winter 1974): 49–66.
Even Woolf’s characteristic allusiveness — a technique I have documented and analyzed in my Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf’s Use of Literary Allusion (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1979) — is a function of her historical mind. I took the title phrase from A Room of One’s Own; it is a revealing bit of historical ontology à la Woolf.
Jacob’s Room and The Waves: Two Complete Novels (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, A Harvest Book), p. 72. Pagination henceforth will appear in the text.
Night and Day, published in 1919, makes no reference to global warfare. Prior to Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s experience of the First World War is documented only in her diary and letters. “One has come to notice the war everywhere,” she observes in January of 1918 (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume One, 1915–1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 100). Her 1917 entries repeatedly describe her subjection to air raids and bombings. (See Diary, pp. 84–85, 93, 116, 124). In her 1916 through 1918 letters, she referred to raids in which German planes flew over her house, causing her and her husband to take refuge “in the cellar” (The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One, 1888–1912, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Novanovich, 1975), p. 185; see also pp. 112 and 202). By 1918 she was “without meat and butter” (p. 215); it was “impossible to get any milk at all” (p. 225); the constant air raids — “three raids on three nights running,” p. 222 — sometimes require sleeping on the kitchen floor until the all-clear signal (see pp. 214, 217).
Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1925), p. 130.
To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1927), p. 201. Pagination henceforth will be included in the text.
Jack F. Stewart, ‘Historical Impressionism in Orlando,’ Studies in the Novel 5, No. 1 (Spring 1973): 72.
Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, Bollingen Library, 1959), p. xi.
Deiman, p. 55.
For a discussion of the philosophic dimensions of The Waves, see my essay ‘Creative Consciousness and the Natural World in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,’ in The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition, Volume XIV, Analecta Husserliana.
The Years (New York: Harcourt Brace & World 1937), p. 7. Pagination henceforth appears in the text.
March 13, 1936 entry, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Signet Library, 1953), p. 248.
Eliade’s title of the final chapter of Cosmos and History (pp. 141–162). The problem of how history relates to issues of freedom and creativity, which Eliade discusses, are precisely those confronted by Viriginia Woolf in her final decade.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Six, 1936–1941, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 261.
Ibid., P. 308.
Ibid., p. 347.
Ibid., p. 428. She also describes seeing “a plane shot down on the hill besides Lewes” (p. 429) and the “direct hit on top” (p. 429) of the house across the street. From Sussex she wrote of raiders who “machine gunned the next village” (p. 422). 18 She writes of seeing “London all blasted, that too ranked my heart” (Letters, VI 431) and took expeditions to London with Leonard in which they wandered sadly through demolished streets.
Letters, VI, pp. 408, 396.
Ibid., p. 413. 21 Night and Day (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966); p. 271 Cf. Mircea Eliade’s argument, in the ‘Despair or Faith’ section (pp. 159–62) of the ‘Terror or history’ chapter of Cosmos and History that history’s horrors cannot be successfully transcended “unless we accept a philosophy of freedom that does not exclude God” (p. 160). Religion is a prominent theme in Between The Acts.
Compare Eliade on the opposition of accepting the nightmare of history or reidentifying, as did archaic man, “with modes of nature” and “nature’s eternal repetition” (p. 155) in hopes of retrieving spontaneity and creative freedom.
Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1941), pp. 188, 189, et passim. Pagination hereinafter included in the text.
For example, even Woolf’s initial novel, The Voyage Out, postulated the imaginary destination of a primitive South American setting teeming with plant and animal life; this background allowed Woolf to ponder the relationship of civilized consciousness to the prehistorical past.
E. M. Forster, the 1941 Rede Lecture, rpt. in Recollections of Virginia Woolf, ed. Joan Russell Noble (New York: William Morrow, 1972), p. 198.
Eliade, p. 156.
Sonya Rudikoff, ‘How Many Lovers Had Virginia Woolf?’ in The Hudson Review 32, No. 4 (Winter 1979–80): 549.
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Schlack, B.A. (1984). A Long Day’s Journey into Night: The Historicity of Human Existence Unfolding in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic — Epic — Tragic. Analecta Husserliana, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6315-3_16
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