The First Orlando: The Laugh of the Comic Spirit in Virginia Woolf's "Friendships Gallery" - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2001 by Karin E. Westman

The constraints of propriety, coupled with class position, emerge in this same narrative aside, emphasizing further the degree to which the biographer's own material circumstances must necessarily influence his representation of Violet's life. In describing the food consumed by ladies having tea in Violet's garden, the biographer cannot pretend to have an objective view of the scene:

how can I imagine the taste of the cutlets which Lady B__th eats off silver, beneath the eyes of six flunkeys in livery? Cutlets may change their shape beneath such a radiance; and Heaven knows what exquisite nerves are stimulated and begotten by mutton eaten off silver. And as it is with mutton, so it must be with other things; with books, with pictures; with love with life; this is a very good reason why I should not attempt to describe what I do not know--why I should continue to adore it. (283)

Anticipating the narrator in A Room of One's Own (1929), Violet's biographer insists on the influence that good food in pleasant surroundings will have on the creative and intellectual faculties. [11] And, like the narrator of A Room of One's Own who "take[s] the liberty to defy that convention of novels" (10) and describes the quality and quantity of food eaten at the men's college, Violet's biographer defies a related convention of biography by insisting on how the material experience of eating limits a biographer's sympathetic imagination. Woolf's biographical persona thus abandons all claims to objectivity: the subjective emphasis falls, as it does in A Room of One's Own, on the material conditions that allow or prevent a greater understanding for another's point of view.

The difficulty of composing with propriety while still crafting a "true" history marks another aspect of biography that Woolf questions in her comic sketch, as she will in her later work. In "Friendships Gallery," such self-censorship limits Violet's "sincere historian" right from the opening of the sketch:

Forty years ago, our sincerity does her credit, a child was born in a Somersetshire manor house. Whether she was born laughing or crying or both at once or whether she merely accepted the situation and made the best of it, a sincere historian anxious to use only those words that cannot be avoided has no means of telling. (275)

Restricted by the biographical conventions emerging from nineteenth-century social mores, Violet's biographer can only recount the difficulty of maintaining his goal of sincerity and cannot provide sincere speech itself. A paragraph later, the biographer's narrative is thwarted again by these prescribed bounds of speech:

Now the history of Christian names is so interesting that if I had the freedom of my mother tongue, as I have not for a reason to be told in the appendix, [1] I would here expound it; [12] I will only say that forty years ago a Christian name was a Christian name; and that if you wished your daughter to answer with credit in this world and the next you branded her with the virtues of the faith from the very beginning. (275)