“The Spirit of the Age”: Virginia Woolf’s Response to Dynamic Psychology

Abstract

Although Virginia Woolf argued that the moderns were “sharply cut off from [their] predecessors” (Essays III 357), she also believed in the continuity of culture, and in writers’ role as “receptacles” of cultural currents (Meisel, Absent 160). S.P. Rosenbaum has examined some of the currents affecting Woolf herself, but his claim that Woolf’s “writing was shaped by a series of intellectual assumptions about reality, perception, morality, government, and art” needs to be extended to include human psychology (“Virginia Woolf” 11). Through reading and discussions, Woolf directly encountered and interrogated psychologists’ working hypotheses about all aspects of personality, and she responded to psychological discourse that had entered into contemporary culture. In her own ambivalent, idiosyncratic way, Woolf acknowledged both of these sources in a draft of “Character in Fiction” (1924), a paper given before the Cambridge Heretics Society. She claimed:

No generation since the world began has known quite so much about character as our generation.…[T]he average man or woman today thinks more about character than his or her grandparents; character interests them more; they get closer, they dive deeper in to the real emotions and motives of their fellow creatures. There are scientific reasons why this should be so. If you read Freud you know in ten minutes some facts — or at least some possibilities — which our parents could not have guessed for themselves. That is a very debatable point. But how much we can learn from science that is real… and make our own from science? And then there is a… vaguer force at work — a force which is sometimes called the Spirit of the Age or the Tendency of the Age. This mysterious power is taking us by the hand, I think, and making us look much more closely into the reasons why people do and say and think things.…(“Character” 504)

Let us always remember — influences are infinitely numerous; writers are infinitely sensitive.

— Virginia Woolf, “The Leaning Tower” 163