Tales of abjection and miscegenation: Virginia Woolf's and Leonard Woolf's "Jewish" stories

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Leena Kore Schroder

Family rituals which in the first example are presented as suffocating and false here become "lifestyle statements" about ease and beauty; as often as Virginia remarks on the "cheapness" of the Woolfs, she admires the "Englishness" of the Nicolsons (and the straight nose of their Eton tutor). Her very insistence upon the Nicolsons' aristocratic Englishness marks off Leonard's relatives as common and foreign, just as their repeated (and supposed) "accentlessness" implies the heavily accented Jewish voice ("I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh," Virginia had written in her diary 15 years earlier, of Leonard's sister Flora [1:6]). All this is sufficiently clear, and Woolf's innate snobbishness has been noticed often enough. Indeed, the diary entry immediately following this account of the Nicolsons' gracious home life, for 16 September 1929, specifically sets Vita Sackville-West against Marie Woolf as the polar opposites of Virginia's social world: "I am more shattered & dissipated by an hour with Leonard's mother than by 6 hours--no, 6 days, of Vita.... The tremendous gear changing that has to take place grind's one's machinery to bits" (3:253).

It is the demarcating line between these two attitudes, however, that is interesting, if what Vita represents is a kind of ego ideal beneath which lies the constant threat of the abject self, a threat that is made suddenly visible in the image of perishable fruit that associates Marie Woolf with the "brown & soft" pear. In this piece of rotting fruit is condensed Woolf's horror of corporeality itself--that is, nothing less than a horror of death. Thus, her nausea at the rotting pear is more the expression of her own inescapable corporeality than it is a reaction to the secondary physical characteristics of Leonard's Jewish family. Dirt and waste do not threaten from outside but rather present Woolf with her own vulnerable sense of self: a threat not of the foreign but of the foreign as already part of the self. The decomposing fruit is in this sense not so much an external object as it is that which determines identity from within, continually reminding her of what must be ejected or at best controlled in order to maintain the idea of self.

From her prolific private writing it quickly becomes apparent that Woolf's class and race opinions are almost always couched in such terms of physical revulsion. In her many diary and letter appearances, Marie Woolf becomes the conceptual Jew for Virginia, "spry as an old tramp" at age 80, representative of all Jewry who "cant die--they exist on a handful of rice and a thimble of water--their flesh dries on their bones but still they pullulate, copulate, and amass ... millions of money" (Letters 4: 195-96). Virginia Woolf's immediate association of sex and death with money is again revealing. Jews "cant die'; they "pullulate" and "copulate" and make money while their flesh dries corpse-like on their bones. What Woolf's associative thought process from sex to death to money reveals is the danger of that which is capable of trespassing the border: the viscous. Like sex with its emissions, penetrations, and confusions of inside and out, and like the corpse, which is both somebody and nobody, money too exists only as a function of exchange, insinuating itself indiscriminately into high and low, infiltrating the furthest reaches of legitimate and criminal transaction, infecting every social process and institution: filthy lucre. Kristeva, following Douglas, has argued that dirt and decay acquire their negative connotations only in so far as they relate to the cultural idea of a boundary whereby clean is delineated against unclean: "Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death" (71). Substances that cross this boundary are physically threatening, socially embarrassing, and culturally taboo, confusing the distinction between inside and outside that constitutes difference and structures the bounds of identity.