Virginia Woolf: Classic or Dud? Search & Destroy

Destroy: To the Lighthouse

Also, Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours', the Pulitzer novel from a couple of years ago that's a sort of tribute to/recontextualization of Woolf's novels.

Destroy: 'Mr B and Mrs B', Fire With Fire, Peter & The, Professor Heinz.

I'm reading A Room of One's Own and wondering how much of a "feminist classic" this is taught as/considered to be. I was under the impression that it was generally considered to be a work of importance in that realm, but its concern seems more literary than feminist, IMO. She wants more good literature, more expression of genius -- not more rights for women (though this is obviously bound up with point one, it's not really her concern at all). Agree/disagree?

Generally agree. Woolf never gives me the impression that her feminism stretched to the Lower Orders anyway.

Perish the thought

However, she is awesome if only for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought_hoax

Woolf hated feminists, generally: lots of great female writers (Elizabeth Bishop, for instance) did. Making sure young women have a room of their own and a guaranteed financial allotment, however, strikes me as rather pro-grrrrl.

Ahhh, kind of. It's a funny piece to read today because on the one hand it's totally on to some Feminine Mystique-esque stuff, basically that women can't self-actualize when they're being harassed and nagged and playing support staff for the self-actualization of men. But it's also saying basically that to write fiction women have to be in the leisure class - to have a room of one's own and a guaranteed income.

I think her feminism doesn't reduce well down to anything easily recognizable in today's terms but there's a lot to draw from it. There's a very interesting short essay where she reminisces about watching the speeches of women labor leaders and suffragettes - she's quite frank about being really impressed but also fundamentally unable to relate because of her own class. Not saying that lets her off the hook for anything but it's an interesting read.

Making sure young women have a room of their own and a guaranteed financial allotment, however, strikes me as rather pro-grrrrl.

That's true, but she did rather depend on Cook supplying the meals and the Maid doing all the housework.

i hear jonathan franzen has a daily.

Making sure young women have a room of their own and a guaranteed financial allotment, however, strikes me as rather pro-grrrrl.

Only rich women, though.

she had class issues for sure; i think of three guineas as unimpeachably feminist, though. also amazing.

I have issues with her, and not even for Dreadnought reasons: I like just about every bit of non-fiction and essay she did; I like the sort of side-work book where she seems to be having fun (like Orlando and Flush); and yet her actual novels I am just furiously bothered by in a way that sometimes gets almost personal.

"side-work books," sorry -- wish I could elaborate on what it is I dislike about her "main" novels, but I've never managed it.

Yeah I recently read this for 1st time too and the ready income bothered me, and I dont quite know why. Whats wrong with someone being housebound and looking after kids still writing novels? She marvels at how Austen did that as if theres no possible way it could be done.

I made some vague noises about this on LJ and got my head torn off by all my chicklit fem friends who made me feel like afule who has misread the work :|

Ha, I seem to remember some sort of Freidan RIP thread where this point was argued at length with Momus, and I felt incredibly weird remaking the century-old argument that, umm, so long as life costs money, some measure of economic independence is necessary for people to really have a lot of control over what they do with themselves.

As much as I adore her criticism and novels (give "To the Lighthouse" another try, nabisco), I find her crypto-feminism a peripheral affair; she's more interested in articulating a tone -- a note of amused querulousness, tinged by contrarianism -- than in puzzling out her politics.

I would take your advice, Alfred, but there was a short period of intensive Woolfiana in my education -- all the way down to extensive reading of diaries and correspondence -- that I suspect will have been Enough Woolf for Me until at least 15-20 years from now.

I agree with you Nabisco, certainly! And I admit, part of what bothers me is probably resentment/envy hah. It is that money without the grind of a regular (ie, creativity-destroying!) job that I feel problematic about her *seeming* to imply neccesary. Again, I perhaps ammisreading. Have not read any else by her I have to point out.

i disliked to the lighthouse so much i never gave her other stuff a chance.

how can i even attack you about this, nabisco, if you don't know why you don't like the novels? :(

The Voyage Out is a fascinating, flawed attempt at a realist narrative; maybe you guys should give a try.

i don't see what's so controversial about saying ppl need financial stability/independence in order to spend your days, uh, writing novels or whatever instead of struggling to have enough money to eat.

i adore mrs dalloway; never read anything else.

I just think its unfair to suggest that you need the "room of ones own" and all that this implies mataphorically - no distractions, none of the womans burden (work, children, homekeeping etc), because all that interferes with the creative process.

I think I resent it in a way, even though I'd agree in principle I'd get more done if I had the idle time to do it in! Perhaps I am laboring a point not made so much in the essay though? I need to re read it.

Gah excuse my spelling, this kbd has dodgy keys and I've had a rotten day and am a bit distracted.

The Waves is one of my two or three favorite books. I used to have a lot of anxiety about the order in which people read "my" authors, particularly Woolf. I'd hear about people reaching a roadblock a few pages in and never trying her again. I used to feel like, gah, if only they'd started with Insert Book Here, they'd see it's worth slogging through to get to the worthwhile stuff. With Woolf, people tend to recommend To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway onaconna them being not too long and mostly accessible. But they're obviously not sure bets for everyone (cf. Velko's post).

Now I think one has to let people discover what they discover, and like what they like, on their own. Woolf is a kinda acquired taste, and no amount of my own handwaving it going to convert someone who isn't willing to be converted. And some people might find that, heck, The Years or something is their way in. Go figger.

I generally agree with the tenor of posts upthread about her social polemics. Of course as an artist, she's mainly interested in how more/better art might get made. And if we're going to value high-art products, there's no getting around the rather brutal economics of their production.

On some level she knew this to be a pretty classbound concern, and it's not going to line up well with what we might call a progressive agenda. But. She could be seen as an Edwardian around whom swirled the Victorian hangover. She and her peer group would have seen that Wildean art-for-art's sake wasn't tenable any longer. So they needed some altruistic cover, which I think they mostly found by being lukewarmly Fabian. In modern American terms it's like being a Whole Foods Democrat. Not everybody needs to be Billy Bragg.

Whatever one thinks of her gender or class politics, she is responsible for some fine, fine sentences.

Also, on an issues-based political scale (as opposed to identity politics) she does okay with general "progressiveness," ie Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway are, with varying subtlety, incredibly forceful statements against the military state, propaganda, how military culture infiltrates everyday life, etc. Between the Acts is more of an early-40s o noes merry olde england is doomed to be destroyed thing, but still. The social consciousness is much more in terms of word choice and metaphor than in manifest content though.000000000000

Here's some crap I wrote about Woolf and women's lib:

http://www.ummagurau.com/writing/academic/virginia3.htm

and here's the military-politics-in-Mrs. Dalloway thing:

http://www.ummagurau.com/writing/academic/virginia2.htm

These are both undergraduate papers and I kind of cringe at them now but I was pretty deep in the zone of the books and couldn't begin to recreate the analysis now...

Of course she's progressive, as well as a great English artist.

Funnily enough the line about "fine, fine sentences" doesn't hit the right mark for me - that's a really a Nabokovian sort of criterion (which we apply to lots of people: Joyce, Bellow, Updike, Martin Amis et al). VW's actual sentences don't usually seem very aesthetically fine or outstanding: what's fine about her is the overall flow of thought, feeling and understanding -- and in this she is indeed very fine, one of the finest ever.

Doc Casino: Your real name is AWESOME

seconded

hahaha thanks guys. I didn't mean to give away my secret, cool-named identity but I guess now the cat's out of the bag.

also awesome: the title line of both webpages

(I am assuming you opted against actually using it as yr paper title for obvious reasons)

every year, more or less every time I read another of her books, she rises a little higher on my "all-time favorites" list. as Sundar said starting the thread, Orlando is brilliant.

reading orlando now!

about 1/3 thru

I just bought The Waves last week, but I haven't started it yet. really liked Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, so I'm lookin' forward to it.

I def. titled one of them "Woolfin' It Up," b/c I remember him red-inking back with basically the same bad pun.

ha, i was gonna comment on the webpage titles too. I'm wondering at what point in my academic career it'll be okay to start using atrocious puns as titles (currently: Masters student = still too early). I'm not very bold.

Semi-agreed with Pinefox about the sentences point; while I think there are many beautiful sentences in her writing, that kind of atomistic way of thinking about it is really the opposite of what her work does at its strongest.

I was completely blown away by 'The Waves' and 'To the Lighthouse' and came to see what ILXors had to say, and was amazed at how negative everyone was (it wasn't this discussion here). And then I read 'Mrs Dalloway' and kind of saw where people could be coming from with their criticisms; language that seems to be purple for the sake of purpleness, an air of profundity when there isn't really anything there, POINTLESS SIMILE AFTER POINTLESS SIMILE AFTER POINTLESS SIMILE. I haven't read anything else since, I hope I haven't just reached some kind of brick wall as to how much Woolf I can take.

I'm currently working on something called "Bauhaus: In The Muddle of Hist'ry" which is maybe a bad idea but maybe the best thing about the paper right now...

You know how you save one book or album by a favorite artist for when you come 'round to them again? Night and Day is one of them. I know it's 'transitional' and so on. Is it still worth a read?

It's been ages, but it's...okay? It's sort of her doing a straight up soap opera type plot. Will he finally say how he feels?? There are definitely some Woolfian tendencies but actually I would say it's a step backwards after The Voyage Out which was also Edwardian and plotty as all hell but at least had the brilliant, Jacob's Room-esque final act.

I still haven't done Flush and I honestly can't remember if I ever read The Waves or not....

I read TVO a loooong time ago at the height of my Woolf phase in my freshman year of college; what I remember are passages of precocious sensuality and the appearance of the Dalloways, the latter of which are akin to gifted supporting actors making winning cameos which garner them Oscar nods.

Hahahahah, I forgot about that! IIRC Clarissa is much more stuffy and unlikeable there.

Great thing about Voyage Out is that Rachel, the seeming coming-of-age protagonist, just dies out of nowhere from some tropical disease they picked up while on a picnic. And the supporting cast kind of looks around, and shrugs along doing nothing of any consequence for like the last fifth of the book. Which sort of acts as a commentary on the education of women in VW's time and so on - - - she can't come of age because there's nothing there, she has no ideas, no ambitions, no prospects and barely any personality. But it's a hell of a long book to just set up that one payoff. You really long for the vicious economy she began holding her pages to in the mid-nineteen-teens.

The only other one of her major novels I've had trouble getting past page fifty is her bestseller The Years. Go figure.

Oh, The Years is a total chore. Some reward in the way threads start to develop and recur, but Woolf herself described it as "my vomit."

To The Lighthouse was a chore to begin with but by the time I finished it, I thought it was a masterpiece. I love that it doesn't take a standard realist route but uses the commonplace to get at really profound issues between a family.

Orlando is really great. Funny, sharp, and radical. The prose is so elegant, reading it is like cutting half-melted butter, which is so unlike her prose style in mrs. dalloway and other “serious” novels.

POINTLESS SIMILE AFTER POINTLESS SIMILE AFTER POINTLESS SIMILE. - Merdeyeux

She lampoons this tendency in Orlando. It’s funny. She savages the whole tradition of English poetry, it seems, in order to save it. A very high modernist impulse, but she does it in a way that is really fun. (“Oxen of the Sun” is not fun).

I love her

I keep thinking about *To the Lighthouse*. I think of everything in a Buddhist context at the moment, but I can't think of another writer so desperate to catch the moment as it flies, making the human tragedy of passing time so front and centre.

This quote is a cliche by now but: "I meant to write about death only life came breaking in as usual."
I know she isn't so interested in character, per se, but in creating the spaces *around* characters, and marking their passage through the world, her characters become numinous, like moving vehicles of light.

I see her precursors as Manley-Hopkins and maybe someone like Richard Jeffries? Which might also be a way of saying, she's got a lot to answer for with certain modern nature writers.

The writer she's made me pick up again is R.F. Langley.