Virginia Woolf and the problematic nature of the photographic image

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by Helen Wussow

Lets leave the letters till we're both dead. Thats my plan. I don't keep or destroy but collect miscellaneous bundles of odds and ends, and let posterity, if there is one, burn or not. Lets forget all about death and all about Posterity.

Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth

September 17, 1938 (Letters 6:272)

There is something defiant and mocking in Virginia Woolf's stance before death, her future biographers, and the eventual iconization of her image through photographic material. Her bravado is especially noteworthy given her reservations concerning the art of the biographer and so-called biographical evidence. Her own attempts to write a biography of Roger Fry drove her to distraction and frequent bouts of depression. In her diary entries from January 1936 to December 1940, Woolf reveals her anxiety over Fry's biography, a work she was commissioned to write by his sisters. She often refers to the task as a "grind" (Diary 5: 155, 182, 222, 235) and in a letter to Ethel Smyth of August 7, 1938, she complains,

I think I've mounted a barren nightmare in this book (R.F.) but shall finish the dreary round and then dismount and see what's the use of it. Odd what a grind biography is. (Letters 6:262)

Later, writing during the autumn to Vanessa Bell, Woolf calls her attempts to capture Fry in her frame of words an "appalling muddle." She compares her work to Vanessa's visual art and suggests that her words are the "paint" into which she must mix "dozens of snapshots" of her subject (Letters 6:285).

Woolf's frustration over the "snapshot" effect of biography is linked to her distrust of the photographic image. The use of photographic evidence was of particular interest to her. She used photographs in Orlando: A Biography (1928), Flush: A Biography (1933), Three Guineas (1938), and Roger Fry: A Biography (1940). Her use of these images, however, serves to call into question their factuality and the overall stability of the photographic subject/object. The photographs in Three Guineas, for example, reveal how an image can be manipulated to serve a rhetorical purpose.(1) Q. D. Leavis was not far off when she stated that the photographs were "selected with malice" (205). However, she missed Woolf's ironical point regarding the supposed neutrality of photographs. Woolf chose the images in order to make the argument that photographs can be manipulated and supposedly hard factual evidence weighted on the side of one's argument. Queenie Leavis unwittingly touches upon Woolf's purpose in selecting the photographs when she comments "how a corresponding selection, probably as stupid-looking or ridiculous, could be compiled of eminent women's faces and persons in gala dress" (205). Woolf's whimsical selection of photographs included in Three Guineas helps to reveal further the specious arguments of a patriarchal society against the education of women and the need to spend large sums on national defense. In pointing to the ridiculous appearance of men who govern, Woolf indicates the absurdity of their arguments and beliefs. In making this case she also reveals how any photograph can be shaped to suit the program of the author, how supposedly neutral data can be biased in favor of the desired outcome.

Just as she mocks, in Three Guineas, the credulity of a public that reads and believes everything it sees in illustrated papers, so, in Orlando, she ridicules the manipulation of photographic "evidence" in biographical studies. John Berger has suggested that we each bring an ideological code to our "way of seeing" (8-9). In Orlando Woolf confronts the codes we use to approach the concept of evidence and how it should be read. She undermines the supposed faithfulness of a biography toward its subject by presenting false photographic evidence. For example, the captions beneath the photographs included in the text urge the reader to "see" Sasha and Orlando in the image. The photo of Angelica Bell in fancy dress is not a portrait of "The Russian Princess as a child", nor is the plate of Vita Sackville-West in costume a likeness of "Orlando about the year 1840". The caption beneath a photo of Sackville-West (taken when she was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1927) reads, "Orlando on her return to England". Woolf asks the reader to identify Sackville-West as Orlando and accept the photograph as evidence of Orlando's existence. Although we may recognize Sackville-West in the photograph, we must simultaneously perceive her as Orlando. The difficulty in reading the image is similar to the problems presented by Orlando's androgyny and agelessness. The reader may wish to comply with Woolf's captions and read the photographs as representing Orlando. There remains however, a disconcerting sensation that Woolf's text trifles with the evidence and the reader. In Orlando both image and text are jokes and the best joke of all is on the reader. Woolf herself described Orlando as "my nonsense book," "my bad joke" (Letters 3: 493, 506). When text and image are brought together in Orlando, concepts of meaning disintegrate and new definitions of truth begin to evolve.