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

Such emotional strait-jacketing or patriarchal silencing of sentiment worked as an effective censor throughout Woolf's development, particularly in these early years when she still filtered her work and responses through a largely male circle. A fascinating diary entry of March 18, 1920 documents such censorship operating within her close group; in it Woolf records her perceptions of the gender dynamics of a meeting of the Memoir Club in which she read memoirs about the sexual abuse she suffered from her half-brother:

Still if this diary were the diary of the soul I could write at length of the 2nd meeting of the Memoir Club. Leonard was objective & triumphant; I subjective & most unpleasantly discomfited. I dont know when I've felt so chastened & out of humour with myself - a partner I generally respect & admire. 'Oh but why did I read this egotistic sentimental trash!' That was my cry, & the result of my sharp sense of the silence succeeding my chapter. It started with loud laughter; this was soon quenched; & then I couldn't help figuring a kind of uncomfortable boredom on the part of the males; to whose genial cheerful sense my revelations were at once mawkish & distasteful. What possessed me to lay bare my soul! Still, the usual revulsion has now taken place. (D2 26) The diary passage clearly delineates how Woolf's relationship with her peer group shaped her self-worth and her perception of her work(10) while revealing her assessment of her closest "coterie" (as Zwerdling called them) as a board of censors (or male bored of censors). Analyzing the "sharp sense of the silence" as male censorship of the "mawkish & distasteful" subjective emotions, Woolf astutely discerned the male audience's preference for the "objective" and entertaining and their censoring out of her "subjective" revelations, what she termed "my soul."(11) The diary poignantly captures Woolf's anguished response of feeling "chastened," witnessing how such censorship demolished her sense of self-worth. Though she mimics what she heard underlying their silence, condemning herself and her writing as "egotistic sentimental trash!," her entry ends with an ambiguous reference to "the usual revulsion."

Certainly, her coterie defined or experienced emotion in ways which left room for challenges and had an impact upon her struggle with emotion and aesthetics, but Woolf's lifelong struggle to orient herself to emotion was not limited to the arena of aesthetics. The relationship to emotion was a life and death matter for her, directly tied to sanity and survival. Impatient with efforts to deflect emotion by using denial or an aesthetics of control, she sought a good working relationship with emotions, realizing that the emotions of life must be felt and expressed or they imploded into madness. But such a project was difficult. In life and in art Woolf saw emotion denied, controlled or in dangerous excess. Thwarted or repressed female emotions and tyrannical unchecked male emotions were the norm within the patriarchal family; Woolf described Leslie Stephen's scenes about money in which he roared and screamed at Vanessa and Ginny had to stand by: "Never have I felt such rage and such frustration. For not a word of my feeling could be expressed."12 Woolf recognized the failure to feel, that immense distance from emotion, as madness. Her memoirs recount how, at the death of her mother, it was the failure to feel which signaled her madness: "I remember very clearly how even as I was taken to the bedside I noticed that one nurse was sobbing, and a desire to laugh came over me, and I said to myself as I have often done at moments of crisis since, |I feel nothing whatever'" (MB 92). In Mrs. Dalloway Woolf faulted patriarchal culture for the self-destructive macho stoicism Septimus learned from the war:" ... when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime."(13) His madness mirrored Woolf's guilt for her failure of feeling at her mother's death: "For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried, he had, especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not feel" (MD 131). In his poignant mad-sane way, Septimus knew that this failure to feel was wrong, "an appalling crime" for which he had "been condemned to death by human nature" (MD 145). Because Woolf experienced "not feeling" as inseparable from death and insanity, she challenged those aesthetics which appeared to deny or distance emotion.