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

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

Woolf's essays and Night and Day point to her familiarity with literary geography, literary pilgrims, and blue plaques. They also point to, and criticize, how these texts, practices, and projects made spaces of illusion into spaces of fact--into "tangible brick and mortar" (Essays 1: 35). For Woolf, the logic of place and literary worth promulgated by memorialized London suggested that literature was mundane rather than masterwork--it imprison [ed] immortals between brick walls" and so disillusioned readers. The portrait of a literary pilgrim to Dr. Johnson's house underscores how literary and historic London is inimical to the literary imagination for Woolf. What is pathetic about the anemic-brained man in the ulster is that he has been misled, that the tablet will not fulfill his earnest belief in its power as a representation of Dr. Johnson, and yet the man will continue to believe in the tablet. Woolf's worry about literary geography and commemoration plaques is that their identification of the "right" place will either lead to a passive and "docile" appreciation, or will disillusion readers of their necessary illusions. In either case, the reader, the writer, and literature are lost to a tablet.

That Woolf would offer such a critique of the pilgrims and places of literary and historic London may surprise some scholars. Woolf enjoyed visiting literary shrines such as the Haworth Parsonage and Keats's house in Hampstead, and often portrayed them as places of communion with authors rather than places of their imprisonment. Literary museums are to Woolf very powerful spaces, spaces that can determine how the visitor relates to the author--passively or appreciatively, as mortal or immortal. Literary memorials are dangerously, sometimes thrillingly, prescriptive. Woolf's description of the Brontes' Haworth Parsonage in a 1904 essay written for The Guardian makes clear how memorial spaces structure the visitor's interpretation of the author. She describes the display cases in the Haworth Parsonage:

the most touching case--so touching that one hardly feels reverent in one's gaze--is that which contains the little personal relics, the dresses and shoes of the dead woman. The natural fate of such things is to die before the body that wore them, and because these, trifling and transient though they are, have survived, Charlotte Bronte the woman comes to life, and one forgets the chiefly memorable fact that she was a great writer. (qtd. in Morris 91)

The Bronte reliquary at once affords a sort of communion with the great writer ("the woman comes to life") and strips Bronte of her high place as artist, author, and object of devotion: "one hardly feels reverent in one's gaze" and so "one forgets ... that she was a great writer." While literary museums provide relished moments of communion with great writers such as Bronte and Keats, the case--the arrangement, collection, and display of "relics"--also elicits Woolf's irreverent gaze. [10] The admixture of communion and sacrilege is a product of the museum space that arranges and interprets the artist for us, and at Haworth it demotes Bronte the author to a woman as much as it promotes the woman as an author.