Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde by Christine Froula

Author:Christine Froula
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004120, Literary Criticism/European/English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, LIT004290, Literary Criticism/Women Authors
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2006-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Woolf doubts that her opinion “would be printed,” since her “values” are not the celebrated economist’s; perhaps she could not easily utter it even in freethinking Bloomsbury, since Keynes owned the Nation, and Leonard had until recently been its literary editor (xxxvi). Yet in Three Guineas she eventually publishes more or less what she says here she cannot, even extrapolating from this Self-Portrait as Muzzled Critic a comic vision of the Lady of Clare, appearing over Cambridge as “a cloud in the sky” in “the shape of a woman; who, being supplicated for a sign, let fall in a shower of radiant hail the one word ‘Rats’” (TG 230 n. 18, P/S xxxiii–xxxv & n). Although women’s values will put them at “loggerheads with some respected chiefs” of their “innumerable professions,” she tells her audience, their “most amusing and exciting experiences will be” to bring their “ancient and privileged professions”—law, architecture, medicine, finance—“more in touch with human needs” and to “adapt” them to “your sense of values, your common sense, your moral sense[,] your sense of what is due to humanity and reason” (P/S xxxvi).

Woolf’s challenge to her friend Maynard’s complacent masculine privilege dramatizes her increasingly oppositional stance within Bloomsbury and the difference an audience makes.11 The professional women called out more radical speech than even Bloomsbury did, or so Woolf’s observation that her Speech left Leonard “slightly exacerbated” (“interesting … if … true”) suggests (D 4:7, 23 January 1931). In the Speech’s third self-portrait, Woolf revisits Bloomsbury’s Cambridge origins and reworks Room’s “Portrait of the Artist Rebuked by a Beadle” into a drama of self-censorship. As in Room, the woman artist is lost in reverie, “letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in our unconscious being.” But now, with no beadle in sight, she wakes with a jolt from this deep world, this collective (“our”) unconscious, as her fish—women’s sexual life—gets away:

The imagination has rushed away … into what dark pool of extraordinary experience. The reason has to cry “Stop!” … The imagination comes to the top in a state of fury. … how dare you interfere with me! … And I—that is the reason—have to reply, “My dear you were going altogether too far. Men would be shocked.” Calm yourself, I say, as she sits panting on the bank … with rage and disappointment. … In fifty years I shall be able to use all this very queer knowledge … But not now. … I cannot make use of what you tell me—about womens bodies for instance—their passions—and so on, because the conventions are still very strong. If I were to overcome the conventions I should need the courage of a hero, and I am not a hero. … [T]here are conventions, even for men; and if a man like Lawrence … runs against convention he injures his imagination terribly. … you would not like to become shrivelled and distorted … It is your nature to understand and to create.

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