Abstract
Virginia Woolf has been celebrated as an innovative modernist who broke with past traditions, greatly contributing to changing the future of the novel as well as women’s place in cultural production. Paradoxically, however, Woolf’s modernist originality can be shown to be inscribed, reversely, in her rescripting of the past. As will be argued in the book, her historiographical narratives form a topos in which her political thought, and particularly her feminism, are uniquely intertwined with her literary modernism and the condition of modernity itself. Woolf’s notion of history and historiographical practices, as encountered in both her fictional and critical writings, are informed by the experience of modernity, its nature, failures and possibilities, in as much as the historical epoch of modernity not only forms the context of Woolf’s life and works but also ushers in a novel phase of relating to the past, consequent on the demand for constant break and innovation peculiar to it. It constitutes the historical moment when the very division between the old and the new was consolidated and a cult of the new was established alongside a sense of loss of what had been. It is this sense of the present, as a ‘now’ which is incessantly always-already passing, that also creates the need to capture the past through remembrance, which historiography and art are called upon to meet. The narration of the past and its vicissitudes thus, by inversion, comprises a prime modus of articulating the consciousness and experience of modernity.
[…] there are constructs that bear the deepest affinity to philosophy, or rather to the ideal form of its problem, without constituting philosophies themselves […]. These constructs, which are thus actual, not virtual, and are neither questions nor answers, are works of art. Works of art do not compete with philosophy as such. They do, however, enter into the pro-foundest relation with it through their affinity to the ideal of its problem. […] What critique basically seeks to prove about a work of art is the virtual possibility of the formulation of its contents as a philosophical problem […].
(W. Benjamin)1
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Notes
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Theory of Criticism’, in Selected Writings 1 (1913— 1926), ed. Marcus Bullock and Michel W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 217–18.
Cf. Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 34, 61.
Cf. Laura Marcus, ‘Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf’, in Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 210. For more recent readings of women’s contributions to, and perspectives on, modernity see, for example,
Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990);
Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace (eds), Women Artists and Writers: Modernist Impositionings (London and New York: Routledge, 1994);
and Rita Felski ‘Modernism and Modernity: Engendering Literary History’, in Lisa Rado (ed.), Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 191–208.
Cf. Rachel Bowlby ‘Introduction’, in Rachel Bowlby (ed.), Virginia Woolf (Essex: Longman, 1997), pp. 6, 14.
Woolf has been accused by her contemporary critics of being a snob and of leading her readers into ‘a narrow room’ of lyricism and individual perceptions instead of inviting them to ‘confront the realities of world politics’, as discussed by Berenice Carroll in her article, “To Crush him in our country”: The Political Thought of Virginia Woolf’, Feminist Studies 4.1 (1978), pp. 99–131, which attempts to redeem Woolf as a political thinker. On Woolf and the Scrutiny ‘debate’, see, for example, Eleanor McNees, ‘Colonizing Virginia Woolf: Scrutiny and Contemporary Cultural Views’, in Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino (eds), Virginia Woolf and the Essay (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 41–58. However, apart from her systematic promotion of women’s rights in her writings and her conspicuously political piece Three Guineas, Woolf can be considered an activist in that she also partici-pated in pacifist committees and collaborated with The Women’s Cooperative Guild.
See, for example, Marianne Dekoven in her essay ‘History as Suppressed Referent in Modernist Fiction’, ELH 51 (Spring, 1984), pp. 137–52; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). Moreover, Pierre Bourdieu in his book The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), offers an insightful discussion of the imbrication of modern(ist) aesthetics and its historical context, suppressed by the promulgation of the ‘art for art’s sake’ motto.
Cf. Georg Lukács, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in The Meaning of Contempo-rary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London and New York: Merlin Press, 1962), pp. 17–46. For a comprehensive and compelling discussion of the debate on modernism among Marxist thinkers, see Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (London: Verso, 1982).
Cf. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 4.
See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
Also see Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). Inversely, for a reassessment of the effect modernist literary techniques have had on historiographical conventions,
also see Hayden White’s more recent: ‘The Modernist Event’, in Vivian Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 17–38.
See, for example, James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987);
Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); as well as the bibliography cited in note 15. For so called ‘modernist’ trends in historiography itself,
see Michael Bentley, ‘Introduction: Approaches to Modernity: Western Historiography since the Enlightenment’, in Michael Bentley (ed.), A Companion to Historiography (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 395–508.
The new wave of French feminism was propounded, among others, by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, who celebrated Woolf’s notions of androgyny and ‘écriture féminine’. For the invention of a female literary tradition, see, for example, Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). For an overview of recent French and Anglo-American theories of écriture féminine inspired by Woolf’s concepts of androgyny and women’s writing, see Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: FeministLiterary Theory (London: Routledge, 1988).
See Michèle Barrett’s edition of Woolf’s feminist essays, Virginia Woolf On Women and Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), first published in 1979; and compare her similar, ‘Introduction to A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas’, in Julia Briggs (ed.), Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works (London: Virago Press, 1994), especially p. 354. For the contextualization of her work,
see Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986);
and Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997);
Linden Peach, Virginia Woolf (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000);
Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); and Michael Whitworth, who insightfully places her work within the historical, literary, scientific and conceptual contexts in his Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Diary entry on 3 June 1938, in Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Harcourt Brace, 1982), p. 234.
See, for example, Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf Public and Private Negotiations (London: Macmillan Press, 2000);
and Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Bowlby has been pioneering in linking Woolf’s feminism with modernist aesthetics and issues of historiography, while Beer has also been one of the first critics to trace the contestation as well as the resonances of the past, and especially of the Victorian evolutionary conceptual models and liter-ary tradition, in Woolf’s work. See Rachel Bowlby’s inspirational, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988);
‘Introduction: A More Than Maternal Tie’, in Virginia Woolf, A Woman’s Essays, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. ix–xxxiii, henceforth referred to as A Woman’s Essays;
and ‘Introduction: The Crowded Dance of Modern Life’, in Virginia Woolf, The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), pp. ix–xxx, henceforth referred to as The Crowded Dance. Also see Gillian Beer’s insightful essays devoted to Woolf in her collection, Arguing With The Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sydney (London: Routledge, 1989); as well as her later volume on Woolf’s novels, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
More recently, there have been three insightful articles that deal with Woolf’s ideas on history in her essayistic output by: Sabine Hotho-Jackson, ‘Virginia Woolf on History: Between Tradition and Modernity’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 27.4 (1991), pp. 293–313;
Melba Cuddy-Keane, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Varieties of Historicist Experience’, in Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino (eds), Virginia Woolf and the Essay, pp. 59–77; and Beth Carole Rosenberg, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Postmodern Literary History’, MLN 115.5 (2001), pp. 1112–30.
See, for example, David Bradshaw, ‘The Socio-Political Vision of the Novels’, in Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, pp. 191–208; and Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World. More particu-larly, in connection to war and fascism, see Helen Wussow, The Nightmare of History: The Fictions of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (New Jersey, London and Canada: Associated University Presses, 1998); and the essays collected in Merry Pawlowski (ed.), Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators’ Seduction (New York: Palgrave, 2001),
and Mark Hussey (ed.), Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality and Myth (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991).
Also see David Ayers, ‘A Question of Life and Death: Aesthetics and History in the Novels of Virginia Woolf’, in English Literature of the 1920s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 66–98.
For example, there are readings of Woolf’s relationship with and views on Renaissance literature and figures, such as those by Beth Carole Rosenberg, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson: Common Readers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995)
and Juliette Dusinberre, Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).
Moreover, on Woolf’s relationship with Victorian writers and culture, see Perry Meisel, The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980);
Beer’s Arguing with the Past; as well as Steve Ellis’s more recent Virginia Woolf and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), which argues for a Post-Victorian rather than modernist sensibility in Woolf, emphasizing her desire for continuity. Furthermore, Elena Gualtieri investigates the possibilities of a feminist literary history embedded primarily in Woolf’s non-fiction, in Virginia Woolf’s Essays: Sketching the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
More recently, a sketching of Woolf’s representation and incorporation of the literary past has been made with respect to her fiction by Jane de Gay in Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf Vol. I, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975–1980), p. 202, henceforth referred to as Letters followed by volume number. Also see Gualtieri, Virginia Woolf’s Essays, p. 32.
Terry Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’, New Left Review 152 (July/August, 1985), p. 64. Also see Eagleton’s polemical and insightful reading of Benjamin’s work, in Walter Benjamin, or towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1991).
Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), initially published as ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), in A Woman’s Essays, p. 70. This phrase is discussed at length by Julia Briggs in ‘This Moment I Stand On’: Woolf and the Spaces in Time (London: Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, 2001), pp. 8–13.
Walter Benjamin’s Passagen was published in English as The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Benjamin ***’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, appear in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 245–55, henceforth referred to as ‘Theses’.
‘One-Way Street’ appears in Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, ed. and intro. Susan Sontag, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 45–106. The essays ‘The Storyteller’, ‘Franz Kafka’ (1934), ‘Max Brod’s Book on Kafka’ (1938), ‘The Image of Proust’ (1929) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (henceforth referred to as ‘Work of Art’) are included in Illuminations, pp. 83–107, 108–35, 136–43, 197–210, and 211–44 respectively. His essays on Baudelaire are compiled in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), henceforth referred to as Baudelaire;
and his pieces on Brecht appear in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: New Left Books, 1973). ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ is included in One-Way Street and Other Writings, pp. 349–86, henceforth referred to as ‘Fuchs’; and Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, was published with an Introduction by George Steiner, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998).
Also see Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Childhood circa 1900 ([1932–35]1950), trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
For a compelling discussion of Benjamin’s currency today, see Irving Wolfarth, ‘The Measure of the Possible, the Weight of the Real and the Heat of the Moment: Benjamin ****’s Actuality Today’, in Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead (eds), The Actuality of Walter Benjamin (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998), pp. 13–39.
See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A Short Twentieth Century (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), especially pp. 109–42.
Gershom Scholem, Benjamin’s closest friend and scholar of Judaism, cited by Rolf Tiedemann in ‘Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses “On the Concept of History”’, in Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 192.
See Chryssoula Kambas, ‘Politische Actualität: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of History and the Failure of the French Popular Front’, New German Critique 39 (Fall, 1986), p. 89. Kambas gives an insightful reading of Benjamin’s ‘Theses’ in relation to the historical-political actuality culminating in the fascist regime in the forties. The failure of German social democracy and the welcoming by the French Communists of the Hitler—Stalin non-aggression pact in dividing Poland formed the context, the ‘actuality’ of the ‘Theses’.
Jean Radford makes an interesting connection between the political situation of the 1930s and the representation of history found in some modernist novels of that time written by Woolf, Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Bowen. See her ‘Late Modernism and the Politics of History’, in Maroula Joannou (ed.), Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 36. See Janet Montefiore, ‘The 1930s: Memory and Forgetting’, in Maroula Joannou (ed.), Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History, pp. 16–32.
‘A Letter to a Young Poet’, in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol. 2, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966, 1967), pp. 182–95; and ‘The Leaning Tower’, in A Woman’s Essays, pp. 159–78.
See Leslie Hankins, ‘Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin Selling Out(Siders)’, in Pamela L. Caughie (ed.), Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York and London: Garland, 2000), pp. 7, 10.
See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing; Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 290.
For example, in her autobiographical piece ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939) in Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Grafton Books, 1989), pp. 80–1, what Woolf calls ‘moments of being’ are defined as revelations of essences and metaphysical connections.
Cf. Michael Löwy, ‘Revolution against “Progress”: Walter Benjamin’s Romantic Anarchism’, New Left Review 152 (July/August, 1985), pp. 58–9.
See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, ‘Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Alle-gory of the Modern’, in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Lacquer (eds), The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), p. 221.
Also see Deborah Parsons’s Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 17–28, where she argues that the images of women encountered in Baudelaire on which Benjamin draws are not as univocal in their signification and the emotional response they bring out in the poet.
See Eva Geulen, ‘Toward a Genealogy of Gender in Walter Benjamin’s Writing’, The German Quarterly 69.2 (1996), p. 166;
and Angelika Rauch, ‘The Trauerspiel of the Prostituted Body, or Women as Allegory of Modernity’, Cultural Critique 10 (Fall, 1988), pp. 77–88.
For an overview discussion of the issues raised in these articles, cf. Janet Wolff, ‘The Feminine in Modern Art: Benjamin, Simmel and the Gender of Modernity’, Theory Culture and Society 17.6 (December, 2000), especially p. 42.
An early connection between Woolf and Benjamin has been made by Jane Marcus from biographical to thematic and beyond, in ‘Thinking Back Through Our Mothers’, Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1988), pp. 74–9. Interestingly, the exile status of Benjamin together with his tragic death are noted by Janet Wolff in ‘Memoirs and Micrologies: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, p. 161, to be the most commonly taken up topics in relation to Benjamin within the area of cultural studies, where he has lately come into fashion. On Benjamin and the city, also see Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996);
and on Woolf and space, see Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth (eds), Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
On this matter, see Rachel Bowlby ‘Walking, Women and Writing: Virginia Woolf as flâneuse’, in Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Psychoanalysis and Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 13–30; and Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, in Feminine Sentences, pp. 34–50. Laura Marcus also pays attentions to issues of place in her illuminating study Virginia Woolf (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997); and a more recent example of reading Woolf’s fiction in terms of Benjamin’s conceptions of space and urban flânerie is Deborah Parsons’s Streetwalking the Metropolis.
For a ‘geography’ of modernity mapped on to big metropolitan cities in the twentieth century, see Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the 20th Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999).
Ibid., p. 7. About Woolf’s iconization, also see Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf Icon (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000).
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© 2010 Angeliki Spiropoulou
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Spiropoulou, A. (2010). Introduction: Reading Virginia Woolf in Constellation with Walter Benjamin. In: Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250444_1
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