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

However, as the narrative focus shifts away from Jacob's women, the narrator's control over sexual discourse appears to weaken, and it begins to look as if it may be possible for some things to slip through its net. The actions of Woolf's censor and Foucault's description of the regulation of sexual desire begin to diverge as the academic narrator encounters forms of sexuality that seem able to defeat its attempts at sublimation and control. By localizing the regulation of sexuality within a specific institutional complex - the academy and the cultural values it supports - Woolf identifies a discrete target that can be directly attacked as Foucault's seamless web of power relations cannot be. In Woolf's paradigm there are some subjects that the academy cannot afford to touch, even in order to sublimate and redirect them through discourse. As those subjects approach the foreground, they force the academic narrator to take steps that destroy its "ability to hide [its] own mechanisms" (Foucault 86) and thus the overall effectiveness of the academy's regulatory project.

As Clara and Florinda recede, the academic narrator finds its job getting harder and harder. Consorting with mindless prostitutes or timid debutantes is all very well; but Jacob is also in touch with something that could be even more dangerous to the patriarchal academy than a thinking Florinda or an audacious Clara. The most formidable threat to the academy's control over sexuality is Bonamy, not Florinda. And as Jacob's trip to Greece and consequent affair with Sandra Wentworth Williams push Bonamy's sexual desire for Jacob closer to the surface, the finer methods of censorial control become insufficient. To keep the secret, the censorial narrator must resort to more and more drastic modes of censorship.

Woolf's choice of Greece for Jacob's first trip abroad is not an arbitrary one. The academy that produced Jacob "claims for its own the precepts of Athens"; a full indoctrination into the English intelligentsia's prevailing and peculiar brand of classicism "constituted a young man's education at Cambridge" (Moss 47). For Woolf, who combines an idealistic "enthusiasm for the language" of the ancient Greeks with a keen awareness that she and most other women have never been and will never be taught Greek early and long enough to read Aristophanes or Sophocles in the original, this idolatry of ancient Greece as "the founding culture of Western civilization" is a primary symbol of the prohibitive "exclusivity" that marks Jacob's education (Bishop, "Subject" 171). Woolf is sending Jacob to confront the elitist and antifeminist values at the core of the patriarchal academy.

This confrontation initially brings Jacob only disillusionment and depression; Greece itself fails to correspond to the "Greek myth" (137). For the first time, Jacob begins to show some feeble sparks of insight as he wonders whether "respectability and evening parties where one has to dress" might be "at the back of" the "unhappiness" he has begun to experience; for the first time, he finds that "the British Empire" is "beginning to puzzle him" (139). And for the first time, the information that Bonamy "couldn't love a woman" (140) and "was fonder of Jacob than of any one in the world" definitively enters the narrative.