A splice of reel life in Virginia Woolf's "Time Passes": censorship, cinema and "the usual battlefield of emotions."

Criticism, Wntr, 1993 by Leslie Kathleen Hankins

Up one went, down one sank. This terseness, this short-windedness, might mean that she was afraid of something; afraid of being called "sentimental" perhaps ....

I have been thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us. That's clear in an MS I'm reading. If I say this So & So will think me sentimental. If that ... will think me Bourgeois. All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors. Hence their selfconsciousness, their restlessness.

Modernist criticism located women's writing within the obscenity of the sentimental. Yet of course women were modernists.

Modernist aesthetics, operating as one police force patrolling the arts, routinely round up emotion and sentiment as "the usual suspects." But what are the charges? What are the cultural politics of emotion?(4) Emotion was a loaded term within Virginia Woolf's cultural moment, as it remains in ours; emotional issues are about power, control, and gender. Determining the values of emotion, sentiment and sentimentality in art, aesthetics re-enact dynamics of power and control in culture at large. How emotion is controlled and manipulated as a concept in aesthetics - including acceptable levels of and genders for emotional expression, the complex and contradictory values placed upon emotion, and the scapegoating of the sentimental - tell us not only about art but also about the culture within which those aesthetics operate. How and whom do aesthetic codes about emotion work to silence and control? Who wins when "excessive" emotion, sentimentality, passion, and politics are policed out of art in the name of "apolitical" aesthetics?

Woolf's Sentimental Journey: Peer Pressure

But there were many more influences than anger tugging at her imagination and deflecting it from its path.

.... if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.(5)

The aesthetic positions taken by Woolf's peer group vis-a-vis emotion suggest the subtle but pervasive climate of emotional repression within which she thought and wrote. As a less benign form of luminous halo or envelope this translucent net of assumptions enmeshed Woolf's art and critique. Claudine Herrmann's powerful trope for the workings of ideology allows us to reconsider Woolf's well-known image of the envelope: "For me ideology is a kind of vast membrane enveloping everything. We have to know that this skin exists even if it encloses us like a net or like closed eyelids. We have to know that, to change the world, we must constantly try to scratch and tear it. We can never rip the whole thing off, but we must never let it stick or stop being suspicious of it. It grows back and you start again." (6) The invisible net of ideological assumptions, woven in part by her peers, surrounded Woolf and proved a danger precisely because its subtle censorship went unrecognized.

One currently brewing critical debate considers whether Woolf's peers formed a support group or a board of censors for her.(7) Certainly, the complex constellations of those peer relationships, fraught with tension and characterized by convoluted power-dynamics, played a major role in her life and aesthetics.(8) The attitudes of Woolf's brother-in-law, Clive Bell, toward the sentimental, politics and lived emotion perhaps exemplify the peer censorship operating in this little pocket of the culture industry in the early stages of the twentieth century. The tone of his book, Art, smug, chatty and patronizing at the same time, may suggest the atmosphere in which Woolf formulated her own aesthetics of emotion. Bell rejected the sentimental because "the emotion it suggests is false" and asserted that "Art is above morals."(9) On art and politics he wrote "To associate art with politics is always a mistake" (A 21), faulting Futurist forms because they are "not intended to promote aesthetic emotion but to convey information" (A 21). According to Bell, art must be divorced from real life: "For to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life" (A 25). He repeated: "What I have to say is this: the rapt philosopher, and he who contemplates a work of art, inhabit a world with an intense and peculiar significance of its own; that significance is unrelated to the significance of life. In this world the emotions of life find no place. It is a world with emotions of its own" (A 27). Within Bell's aesthetics a prime error was "using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life" (A 32). Emotion, then, for Bell, had little to do with feelings of love, hate or humanity, but was limited to an intellectual response to form - one purified rather than "clogged with unaesthetic matter (e.g. associations)" (A 55).