Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture by Jane de Gay

Author:Jane de Gay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Trespass and tourism

However, ‘nothing was simply one thing’ (TL 251) as Woolf attests, and while her visit to Hagia Sophia was revelatory in terms of her spirituality and aesthetic, it also provided impetus for her lifelong interrogation of difference and exclusion. Woolf continued to analyse the feelings of exclusion arising from the experience of being admitted on strict conditions (the removal of shoes) and in a limited capacity (confined to the gallery) and she came to see that her position in British society was akin to being a tourist in Turkey, for women’s involvement in public life was both limited and conditional. This gives rise to a very different metaphorical use of sacred space in Woolf’s work: an ironic one that denotes the exclusion of women. In 1935 when E. M. Forster hinted that she was to be invited to join the committee of the London Library, as an exception to their traditional exclusion of women, she commented: ‘The veil of the temple – which, whether university or cathedral, was academic or ecclesiastical I forget – was to be raised, & as an exception she [woman] was to be allowed to enter in’ (D4 298). The physical partitioning of sacred space in a place of worship is replicated psychologically and politically in the exclusion of women from positions of influence in any sphere. This incident fed in to the development of Three Guineas, in which Woolf again uses sacred space as a metaphor for exclusion: the professions are ‘temples’, and the first generation of professional women were ‘cautiously pushing aside the swing doors of one of these temples’ (3G 102). The universities too are sacred, exclusive spaces, for educated men’s daughters have acquired culture ‘outside the sacred gates’ of Oxford and Cambridge (3G 112). Three Guineas was Woolf’s fullest articulation of her awareness that religion reified social and political exclusion.

The solution that Woolf adopted was for women to embrace their position as aliens in their own country: ‘the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman I have no country”’ (3G 185). This enabled women to be dispassionate observers of British culture, visiting sites in their own country as tourists or trespassers. In ‘The Leaning Tower’, she quoted Leslie Stephen’s aphorism ‘Whenever you see a board up with “Trespassers will be Prosecuted”, trespass at once’ (CE2 181), to urge women to read as widely as possible and evade the ideological barriers that patriarchy had constructed to control interpretation. In envisaging women as trespassers and tourists, Woolf anticipates what Elizabeth Wilson has described as a woman’s capacity to be both a flâneur or ‘detached observer’ and a force of disorder that challenges attempts to structure and control the use of space.18 Although Woolf formulated these arguments relatively late in her career, her practice of flânerie and her representation of it in her work start much earlier;19 we can therefore fruitfully apply these formulations to her visits to places of worship and her representations of them in fiction from earlier in her career.

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