Virginia Woolf and the problematic nature of the photographic image

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by Helen Wussow

The photographs biographers use to represent their subjects are as carefully arranged, whether consciously or unconsciously, as the images designed by advertising firms. They are chosen to conjure an emotional response from the viewer. The material may well be factual, but the choice of image and the caption accompanying it, along with the larger textual context, shape the way the reader encounters and deciphers the iconic message. The supposed neutrality of the photograph often gives credence to the biographer's creative construct of her/his subject. The photographic image, however, is never neutral; it is a part of a larger, fictional matrix. In both Orlando and Three Guineas Woolf points to its manipulative power. Thus it is not surprising that she has become the center point around which several biographical tales have been fashioned. Her biographers would do well to heed the advice she provides in Orlando. She emphasizes that we, as readers/viewers, are dependent upon fragmentary observations. Like Queen Elizabeth, we, too, merely "glance" at the subject/object and recognize only fragments, such as "eyes like drenched violets . . . a brow like the swelling of a marble dome" (15). From these isolated parts we must deduce an entire personality. Woolf underscores that the self is not a single entity, but rather a myriad of simultaneous selves, each defying identification and description (Orlando 308-10).

However, while Woolf rejects the possibility of denotation and knowledge of the subject, she simultaneously invests both text and image with a new significance. Barthes suggests that an absence of meaning is full of all meanings (42). The absence of Orlando as subject results in a wealth of possible subjects. In escaping definition within the form of a biography Orlando avoids identification as male or female and thereby all the connotations such tags bear with them. Like the language and images Woolf uses to construct her text, Orlando will bear an infinite number of interpretations. Woolf has fashioned a joyful, a revolutionary text. The joy provided by Orlando is not the joy of recognition (of Orlando, Sackville-West, or the self-as-subject) but rather the acknowledgment of the supreme joke of the text and its images, a jest which serves to dislocate codes of perception and meaning. Woolf's own biographers and critics need to take her playful warnings seriously. Just as Orlando proves an elusive subject for her biographer, so Woolf has proven to be a complex "manysided picture" (Letters 6:10), "a mass of odds and ends out of which" it is nearly impossible "to make a whole" (Letters 6:416). From out of the "scattered and incongruous fragments" Woolf has left us (Roger Fry 213), we must never forget that she lived "many of [her] lives . . . simultaneously" (213) and that the task of the critic is "to record no steady and interrupted progress, but rather a series of sallies and excursions in different directions" (295).

NOTE

1 In an early essay Jane Marcus comments on Woolf's manipulation of the photographic image in Three Guineas with relation to the Spanish Civil War.