The ethics of indecency: censorship, sexuality, and the voice of the academy in the narration of 'Jacob's Room.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by Susan C. Harris

Taking Little's identification of the double narrative voice one step further, William Handley claims that Woolf's narrative technique reflects Bakhtin's conception of language as "thoroughly social in that it constitutes as it is constituted by communities of human subjects" (Handley 111). In other words, the narrator's "voice" is not unitary, but "variform" (Bakhtin 261) - inhabited by the many voices of Jacob's culture. Handley's argument is based on the assumption, shared by many of his critical predecessors, that Jacob's Room is not finally about Jacob, but about the world that forms him. Different critics offer variations on Dowling's assertion that the novel is "Woolf's painting of the world" (64), a painting that includes the depiction of "the problem of cultural inclusion and exclusion" (Lawrence 31) and a resultant critique of "the machinery that would have assured [Jacob] a place in Who's Who" and "sends him off to war instead" (Zwerdling 904). If this is a novel concerned not so much with inner characters as with the "social forces . . . [that] shape their internal reality" (Handley 112), it would stand to reason that the form of the narrative as well as the content would reflect and criticize those forces.

In a novel as highly parodic and ironic as this one, narration naturally becomes, then, not the monologue of a unitary voice, but the interplay of the multitudinous voices whose dialogue constructs the cultural edifice within which Jacob moves.(2) Narration in this novel makes explicit the internal dialogism that Bakhtin identified in the Word itself, using different and differing narrative voices to interrupt, interrogate, and discredit each other. While these voices cannot be said to constitute separate, autonomous characters, they represent different value systems and remain loyal to different agendas. In a novel deeply concerned with a patriarchal society's methods of "inclusion and exclusion," some of those voices will naturally be loyal to, and speak the language of, the academy. Distinguishing these different voices, where they are distinguishable, and recognizing their sites of conflict help us trace the voice of the academy and investigate the connection between it and the project of regulating sexuality.

One of the conflicts between different narrative voices rages around the characterization of Florinda, a minor player whose role in the novel has been somewhat underexamined precisely because of the intensity of this battle.(3) Contempt for her character comes through to the reader so blatantly that it is hard not to assume that Woolf herself is behind this "obvious mockery" of "the brainless Florinda" (Zwerdling 901). To argue that Florinda is in fact a well-developed character whose psychological complexities are central to the novel would certainly strain credulity; but at the same time, the narrative treatment of Florinda is both more complicated and more important than a simple satirical sketch of an empty-headed grisette. What happens to Florinda is part of a strategy designed to showcase the tactics used by the censors in Jacob's world to prevent sexuality from speaking for itself.