"Night and Day Is Dead": Virginia Woolf in London "Literary and Historic" - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2000 by Andrea P. Zemgulys

[We] don't want the [Hogarth] Press to be a fashionable hobby patronised and inspired by Chelsea.

Virginia Woolf, Diary 190

What has happened of course is that after abstaining from the novel of fact all these years--since 1919--and N. & D. is dead--I find myself infinitely delighting in facts for a change, and in possession of quantities far beyond counting: though I feel now and then the tug to vision, but resist it.

Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary 184

Chelsea provoked Virginia Woolf. In the early twentieth century, the London borough was reputed to be the artistic center of London both because it had been home to eminent Victorian writers and painters and because it was the haunt of Woolf's so-called "bohemian" contemporaries. To Woolf, Chelsea and Chelseans also signified smugness, capricious and cutting appraisals of art, and worst of all, thorough respectability. However, while "Chelsea" became shorthand for everything Woolf despised about London's literary world, its provocation also lay in its resemblance to her own literary world. An admixture of innovation and tradition, fashion and stability, bohemianism and social establishment, Chelsea emblematized Woolf's own compound of traditionalism and iconoclasm, snobbery and fellow feeling--a compound too complexly muddled to be explained away as a divided allegiance between her father's Hyde Park Gate and her own Bloomsbury. That Woolf placed her 1919 novel Night and Day in Chelsea therefore corroborates the widely held view that this novel worked a transition for her from traditional to experimental fictional forms: in Night and Day, she uses the Chelsea setting to represent a conflict between innovation and imitation, between creative modern writers and the preservative literary establishment--a conflict arguably won out by the heroine's moving out of Chelsea. [1]

Woolf's characterization of Night and Day as "dead" suggests that this 1919 "novel of fact" also gave life: Night and Day arguably gives life to a distracting "tug to vision" that characterizes her impressionistic novels, and it gives life to characters who, because now "dead," could become the subject of biography. Indeed, Night and Day was viewed by many of Woolf's contemporaries as a portrait of Anny Ritchie, a portrait that hurt the feelings of the still-living subject. [2] This essay, however, argues that what Night and Day gives life to is London "literary and historic." By 1919, private societies, municipal government, and tour book writers had identified for the public and preserved as memorials the homes of writers, artists, statesmen, and scientists; their publications mapped London through literary and historic associations--including associations with events in fiction. This London was created not only to promote London's status as a "great" city but also to educate its citizens and attract touri sts. Literary and historic London was therefore both a physical place and an ideal, marked out by publications (tour books, maps, and histories), by visitors (tourists, school groups, and ramblers), and by plaqued houses and museums.

This essay examines how Night and Day takes as its setting the literary haunts and homes of London, a setting of fiction that Woolf sees as "fact." In Night and Day Woolf engages with the project of literary and historic London, a project that attempted to make the imaginary spaces of London real--a project that created visitable and material shrines out of authors' lives and literary works in London. Woolf would have this novel "dead" not only because it represented her painful recovery from a nervous breakdown (as Woolf herself suggested [3]) but also because it represents literary and historic London as a fact that makes everything "not possible" (Night and Day 194) for a modernist woman writer in London: Night and Day is structured by a space that orders the central characters and events of the novel through an ideology of tradition and "great men." Acting through this space, characters become defined by the limits that this ideology imposes. Night and Day is a counternarrative to the city that would map its readers, writers, and itself through literary tradition: it gives life to practices that are unassimilable to this order, most importantly in the form of nascent literary experiment which modern consciousness demands. However, I would argue that Night and Day is preoccupied by the literary and historic city, and thus an enactment of that which it represents. The novel's concession to the reality made by its setting reveals the imaginative limits that social and historical contexts can put in place, and moreover, because Woolf deliberately fashioned Night and Day as a traditional novel, it poses the limits of setting as a problem endemic to traditional novel forms. In Jacob's Room (arguably her first modernist novel), by contrast, Woolf will unhinge the relation between setting and meaning that Night and Day crystallizes; in Jacob's Room, literary and historic London will function much like her "mark on the wall" [4]--as a setting that proposes to explain all, but in the end explains nothing. That is, Jac ob's Room recreates literary and historic London as a setting appropriate to experiment rather than to convention, a setting that Woolf will subsequently fictionalize through the ruse of nonfictional biography in Orlando.