Virginia Woolf: visual poetics and the politics of visibility

1 ANA GABRIELA MACEDO Universidade do Minho Virginia Woolf – visual poetics and the politics of visibility In Memoriam: Virginia Woolf Many words crowd, and all and each Unmeaning. The simplest words in sorrow are the best. So let us say, she loved the watermeadows, the Downs; her books; her friends; her memories; The room which was her own. London by twilight; shops and unknown people; Donne’s church; the Strand; the buses and the large Swell of humanity that passed her by I remember she told me once that she, a child, Trapped evening moths with honey round a tree And with a lantern watched their antic fight. So she, a poet, caught her special prey With words of honey and a lamp of wit. Frugal, austere, fine, proud, Rich in her contradictions, rich in love, So did she capture all her moth-like self, Her fluttered spirit, delicate and soft. Yet kept a sting beneath the brushing wing Her blame astringent and her praise supreme. How small, how petty seemed the little men Measured against her scournful quality. Some say she lived in an unreal world Cloud-cuckoo-land. Maybe. She now has gone Into the prouder world of immortality V. S-W. 1 1 Vita Sackville –West (The Observer, 6.4.41). Photocopy of the original journal kindly provided by the University of Sussex Special Collections, from the archive of the “Monks’s House Papers”, Ad 31. 2 The task of writing on Virginia Woolf has become an enterprise of awesome proportions. First of all, undeniably Woolf sides now with Shakespeare whenever a canonical woman writer is needed; besides, her engagement in a mapping of a feminist genealogy and poetics, as claimed in A Room of One’s Own (1929), her search for “the woman’s sentence” and for a style of writing that should be “adapted to the body”, signal the definite transgression of women of the patriarchal “limitations of their sex”, and their entry in a new stage of personal and social responsibility and citizenship: “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind” (Woolf, 1983: 72). Thus, Woolf’s feminist poetics, or even more so, her feminist vision could be called in the true sense of the Kristevian expression, a “future anterior of language”, 2 rather than the bitter embryo of a Bloomian “school of resentment”. 3 Nevertheless, it is hard to find a more complex, polymorphous, at times elusive and even contradictory figure of a writer and of a woman, and one that has inspired more ample and diversified criticism. But of course that comes with being canonized, or rather it is in the nature of canonicity itself. T.S. Eliot, her contemporary and friend, whom she published in The Hogarth Press when only a promising young writer, called her “the center of the literary life of London”; 4 Raymond Williams, an unsuspected intellectual radical, emphasizes her political commitment to the woman’s cause, noting that a branch of the Women’s Cooperative Guild met regularly in her home, 5 which, he 2 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, 1980, p.32. 3 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 1975, p.33. 4 T.S. Eliot,in Recollections of Virgínia Woolf by her Contemporaries, Joan Russell Noble (ed.), 1973, p.148. 5 Raymond Williams’s article, “The Bloomsbury Fraction” in Problems in Materialism and Culture, 1980, (pp. 148-169), is a very powerful and challenging one, given Williams’s marxist convictions and his elaboration of a theory of cultural materialism. Very much against the grain, then, in this context, Williams treats Bloomsbury as an “enlightened fraction” within the individualism of the bourgeois 3 adds, accounts for the degree of “social conscience” which is most often not recognized in the Bloomsbury members. 1Virginia Woolf, re-canonization and the “celebrity cult” “Woolf is a fashionable icon nowadays but I do not know how many people actually read her. I do not know how many people have seen a Picasso, not a postcard, the picture. And of those how many, how many slid nothing inbetween themselves and the work, but looked at it honestly and let it speak? Nevertheless, Picasso is a household name if not a household god and Virginia Woolf is a screen queen. (…) Woolf has been too much in the news. There has been so much concentration on Woolf as a feminist and a thinker, that the unique power of her language has still not been given the close critical attention that it deserves. When Woolf is read and taught, she needs to be read and taught as a poet; she is not a writer who uses for words things, for her, words are things, incantatory, substantial. (...) Virginia Woolf has a gift of wings”. (Winterson,1995: 66; 70; 77). Amongst the tantalizing variety of books and critical essays both on Woolf’s life and work that keep coming out, recent criticism, maybe due to the growing space given to the study of inter art poetics, seems to be particularly oriented to the intersection of the visual world in Woolf’s textual production. In parallel to this, a new trend of criticism has developed, along the lines of Postmodernism, considering the multi “refashionings” of Woolf within the contemporary visual culture and the impact of the media on her work and her personality. 6 liberal. Contradicting the largely disseminated image of Bloomsbury as “withdrawn and languid aesthetes”(p.155), he calls attention to their “political and organizational involvement” (Ibid.), their “social conscience”, namely in the case of Leonard Woolf, through his work for the League of Nations, the Cooperative movement and for the Labour Party. Thus the Bloomsbury “alternative”, its “new style” of “civilized individualism”, as he calls it, constitutes in his view a “remarkable disconnection” within the ideology of liberal individualism: “in its personal instances and in its public interventions Bloomsbury was as serious, as dedicated and as inventive as this position has ever, in the twentieth century, been” (pp.166-7). 6 Amongst the former it is worth mentioning Jane Goldman’s The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf (1998), essentially seeing her oeuvre under the influence of Post-Impressionism; Emily Dalgarno’s Virginia Woolf and the Visible World (2001), a study on the centrality of vision in Woolf’s writing; 4 In a sense we can say that V. Woolf - “the face that sells more postcards than any other at Britain’s National Portrait Gallery”, as stated in the back cover of Brenda Silver’s Virginia Woolf: Icon (1999) has become a celebrity myth or a “star”. As Richard Dyer claims: “Stars are as much produced images, constructed personalities as “characters” are. Thus the value embodied by a star is as it were harder to reject as “impossible” or “false” because the star’s existence guarantees the existence of the value he/she embodies” (Dyer, 2002: 20). The whole issue is exhilarating, and, in my view, closely intertwined. At large it concerns the soft terrain of the relations between high art and popular and mass culture, a crucial distinction within the modernist canon, but whose borderlines have long since become more and more blurred, as Walter Benjamin’s theses remind us. Andreas Huyssen discusses this polemics in a remarkable essay entitled ”Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other”, noting that the modernist “masculinist mystique” (Huyssen, 1986: 198) and its fear of the “feminization of culture” (Idem, 194) ultimately meant “the universalizing ascription of femininity to mass culture (which) always depended on the very real exclusion of women from high culture and its institutions” (Idem, 205-6). And Woolf, the modernist and the feminist, is unremittingly part of it. On one hand, for example, she succeeded to enter the magazine Vogue’s “Hall of Fame”, basically masculine then, on the other hand this implied writing and posing for Vogue (alongside the TLS …), thus trespassing the tight fences between high art and popular culture, as I will discuss further on. Even if this flirtation with popular culture, Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, in Women Artists and Writers: modernist (im)positionings (1994), devote a chapter to Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and “The Sister(s‘) Arts”, where they explore the space women occupied within Bloomsbury and the ambivalence with which their professionalism was regarded; Diane Gillespie and Leslie K. Hankin eds., Virginia Woolf and the Arts, 1997; to the latter belongs Brenda R. Silver’s Virginia Woolf: Icon (1999), which, as the title indicates, is a study about Virginia Woolf as a cultural icon; Pamela Coughie, Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2000); P. Coughie had previously edited Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism, in 1991; Diane Gillespie’s The Multiple Muses of V. Woolf (1993); Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Culture (2002). 5 as one may call it, is less taxing in our days, it is the task of literary criticism to uncover it and thus demystify its polarity. Hence the importance of studying Woolf as a popular myth. Brenda Silver argues that there are two possible ways of looking at the phenomenon of Woolf’s “re-canonization”, “the fact that so many people today see the film or television versions of Woolf’s works before they experience (if they ever do) the versions she wrote or published” (Silver, 1999: 213). First, she argues, we can read/see these adaptations of Woolf’s texts as “more than an activity of literary criticism”, for they themselves become “originals” in their own right, constructing assertions about the writer (Ibidem). Adaptations, as Silver argues, are “re-fashionings” or “re-dressings” of other texts (the true “originals”, the ones that lie behind the new ones), to be globally understood as “performances” existing in an intertextual relation with the former text, as a product of a particular encoding: historical, geographical, cultural, etc. (Idem, 12), much in the same way as a translation exists in relation to the original or source text. However, in a second move, one cannot help seeing that the adaptation itself easily assumes the status of “original”, being read or seen against (instead of) its archetypal “version”. Briefly, Sally Potter’s film version of Orlando, has become Orlando itself. A post-version of Woolf’s feminist utopia, necessarily framed by our contemporary vision of the subject (possibly as an extension of the earlier text, or as a metonymy informed by post-structuralism and post-modernism). An identical situation is that of the box-office hit, The Hours (2002), itself an adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s postmodern, queer Mrs. Dalloway (1998). This is, I believe, a curious case of archival legitimization, since, as it is well known, The Hours was the originally intended title of Woolf’s book. Thus the performed version assumes 6 the perfunctory role of “mîse-en-abyme” regarding the source text, using that privilege to further subvert, actualize and explore to the limit the pre-announced transgressions: be it Orlando’s sexual politics, transgenderism, power politics, ecology, pacifism, etc. On the other hand, one has to contend, Virginia Woolf would soon become fertile ground for “cannibalism”, a target to be easily marketed (sometimes to dangerous extremes, such as Woolf the “postfeminist”…) and made easy for consumption. She has become the unquestionable embodiment of an irreverent ideology (-ies), and thus seemingly appropriated to support the private view enacted by each new version or adaptation. 2Virginia Woolf and Photography In a previous essay on Woolf I have discussed this issue of Woolf’s recanonization via the contemporary film industry. I want to talk today about her ambiguous rapport with photography, and the politics of visibility that is at stake here. It is a well known fact that Woolf took and developed her own photos as early as 1898 (Letters 1: 15). Despite the fact that this topic is recurrent since her earlier writings, it is only recently that critical attention has been drawn to it. 7 Many plausible reasons can be pointed here, the most obvious one being the secondary status traditionally attributed to photography as an art, vis-à-vis painting, for example; the other one concerns Woolf’s own ambiguous and often scornful attitude towards photography, as “imperfect and superficial”, as she claims in Three Guineas (Woolf, 1979: 164). It is the latter which interests me most here. Woolf’s knowledge of Photography and the process of photo developing emerges clearly in a striking essay 7 See Diane Gillespie’s first long essay , “Her Kodak pointed at his head”: V. Woolf and Photography” (1993); Nicola Lockhurst, “Bloomsbury in Vogue” (1998); Brenda Silver, in Virginia Woolf: Icon (1999); Maggie Humm, “V. Woolf’s Photography and the Monk’s House Albums” (2000). 7 from 1919, which is intended as a review of Joseph Hergesheimer’s book Gold and Iron. The first long paragraph in this essay describes in detail the technical process of developing, only to draw from its imagery and apply it using the same technical jargon to the writing of the author in question. I won’t quote at length since it would take too long, but just to give you an idea: In developing a photograph first one black patch appears on the greyish film and then another. By degrees the square of the picture defines itself: here is the edge of a wall; here, isolated but unmistakable, the outline of a croquet hoop. One rocks the fluid from side to side, and watches anxiously for an increasing thickening and intricacy, or the film will certainly prove either under exposed or over. Thus with the books of Mr Joseph Hergesheimer , …(Woolf, 1994: 109). 8 Another crucial factor to have in mind in this context is a biographical circumstance: Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt was Julia Margaret Cameron, the reputed Victorian photographer, who started a career at the age of 50! Virginia was deeply attached to the legacy she received from her aunt and throughout her life together with her sister Vanessa Bell, they reproduced the allegoric settings and the atmosphere of Julia Cameron’s photographs in their own shots (see particularly Vanessa Bell’s “Family Albums”). Woolf devotes an essay to Cameron in 1926, 9 and a play, Freshwater, inspired on Cameron’s life, which Virginia and Vanessa presented to their friends in 1935. Diane Gillespie in her study of Woolf and Photography (1993) shows the recurrence and the importance of photography in Woolf’s novels, since her first novel, The Voyage Out, where the photograph of an idealized dead mother dominates (Gillespie, 1993: 121), or of women photographers, such as Lady Bradshaw in Mrs. Dalloway (p.89). In Orlando, the use of photography is made to suit the ironical 8 Vide Woolf, Essays 1, 1919. 9 Vide Woolf, Essays IV, 1926, pp. 375-386. 8 purposes of the novel, the masking and unmasking, the gender play that constitutes its plot; but, itis particularly in Three Guineas, that photography is used most “aggressively” (Gillespie, 1993:136-7), as a means to denounce the war violence and the institutionalization of power. 10 However, Woolf also resisted photography and its power to fix, to objectify, to rigidly document. As she wrote in Freshwater: “ A fact is a fact; art is art” (p.16), a comment which is intended as ironical, but nevertheless preempts her view that photography does not capture the “truth” of the individual or of consciousness (see the essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), the importance she attributes to character creating, and also the essay “Modern Fiction” (1925), and her criticism to the materialists – Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells, unable to create “character” in fiction). Virginia and Leonard often took photos of family, friends, objects or settings from different angles, as if to reinforce her idea that “anyone perception is incomplete and that only multiple angles of vision can begin to suggest the complete person” (Gillespie, 1993:132). On the other hand, particularly in her short-stories, she seems to want to show glimpses of her mind at work, of memories or emotions, by means of snapshots, as if words were either too scarce or too excessive. Of course, her interest in Impressionism is not alien to this issue. As Maggie Humm refers in her study of V. Woolf, “the Frederick Koch Collection, at Harvard Theatre Library, houses 6 albums, The Monk’s House Albums, together with four boxes containing over two hundred additional loose photographs” (Humm, 2000: 219). Given the importance of visual imagery in Woolf’s narrative, these albums and photographs constitute an additional visual story that helps us make sense of her aesthetics as well as of her life. 10 In Three Guineas, Woolf refers to photography as the “other method of persuasion left to us (…) the photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses” (p.109). 9 Photographs were often exchanged and even demanded from Woolf to her friends, and they were essential to her sense of identity, perhaps, as Humm adds, Woolf believed that “photographs could help her to survive those identity destroying moments of her life” (Idem, 225). In Three Guineas, Woolf writes for example: “Let us then leave it to the poets to tell us what the dream is: and fix our eyes upon the photograph again: the fact” (Woolf, 1979: 163). On a personal level, Woolf reacted aggressively to professional photography. She was photographed by three contemporary well-known photographers: G. C. Beresford, an Englishman, Man Ray, an American; and Gisèle Freund, a German woman living in France. She refused to be photographed by Cecil Beaton, who nevertheless published her picture in his “Book of Beauty”. On the episode she writes in her Letters: “I was furious at being in Beaton’s book” (Letters IV, p. 258). In a letter to Ethel Smyth, (June 7th, 1938), Woolf also complains about the fact that the TLS, on 4th June 1938, had published a photograph of her taken by Lenare in January 1929: The Times photograph – damn them. They rang up and asked for me. Were given the stock reply. “Mrs. W. doesn’t want her photograph published” – whereupon they go to a shop and buy the Lady in the Literary Supplement who gave me a shock. No I don’t think she’s a beauty: but her nose looks sharp eno’ to cut hay with. Why shd. I reflect “what a beautiful woman I am? I’m not, and never think so (this is true) (Letters VI, 3395, p.235). 3Woolf’s Face What about Woolf’s physiognomy, in particular, her face? What was it that each new photographer or painter tried to capture in their different visions and portraits of Woolf? Why is she “the face that sells more postcards at the National Portrait Gallery?” “When viewers turn to photographs to discover the authentic V. Woolf and/or her social meanings, then, they reveal themselves in the process”, as claimed by Brenda Silver (Idem, 137), evoking Roland Barthes’s notes on photography in Camera Lucida: 16 Williams, Raymond (1980), “The Bloomsbury Fraction” in Problems in Materialism and Culture, London, Verso, pp. 148-169. Winterson, Jeanette (1995) Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery”, New York, Vintage International. Woolf, Virginia (1984) The Voyage Out, London, Granta 1915 . ------------------- (1979) Mrs. Dalloway, London, Granta, 1925 . ------------------ (1983) A Room of One’s Own, London, Granta, 1929 . ------------------ (1983) Orlando, London, Granta, 1928 . ------------------ (1979) Women and Fiction, London, The Woman’s Press, (Introd. Michèle Barrett), 1925 . ------------------ (1984) The Common Reader, Andrew Mc Neillie, ed., N. Y. and London, Harcourt Brace Co., 1925 . ------------------ (1979) Three Guineas, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1938 . ----------------- (1976) Freshwater, London: The Hogarth Press. ----------------- (1994) Virginia Woolf: Essays, Andrew McNeillie (ed.), London, Hogarth Press. --------------- (1980) The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Nigel Nicolson (ed.), London, The Hogarth Press. Zwerdling, Alex (1986) Virginia Woolf and the Real World, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London.