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

Woolf's struggle with the censors of sentiment was not an isolated persona one, however, but one shared by a generation of modernist women writers. The complex and conflicted effort to situate themselves in relation to the modern and the sentimental characterized the struggles of diverse modernist women writers, as Suzanne Clark argues: "Their [women writers] importance to us comes precisely because, although they were intellectuals and revolutionaries, women have had to confront and work through the turn against the sentimental" (SM 2). Women writers were required to consider carefully their relationship to emotion because, as Clark notes, "modernist criticism located women's writing within the obscenity of the sentimental" (SM 2). For Woolf, who later wrote "... we think back through our mothers if we are women" (Room 79) the modernist linking of the sentimental and female was doubly disturbing. Deeply affected by the interdiction against sentimentality, Woolf found herself in a vulnerable position in the emotional minefield of modernist aesthetics. The specter of sentimentality haunted Virginia Woolf; her dread of being labeled sentimental filled diary entries and letters such as this one from April 15, 1920 which linked the censoring the sentimental and subjective to gender and to silencing:

Well, two days ago, little elderly Walkley attacked it [her James article] in The Times, said I'd fallen into H.J.'s worst mannerisms - hard beaten |figures' - & hinted that I was a sentimental lady friend. Percy Lubbock was included too; but, rightly or wrongly, I delete the article from my mind with blushes, & see all my writing in the least becoming light. I suppose its the old matter of |florid gush' - no doubt a true criticism, though the disease is my own, not caught from H.J., if thats any comfort ... This slightly checks me from beginning Jacob's room. (D2 29) Acutely aware of charges that she dealt with inappropriate emotions or that she wrote of them in the wrong way, Woolf wrote in a diary entry on March 27, 1919: "In my own opinion N. & D. is a much more mature & finished & satisfactory book than The Voyage Out; as it has reason to be. I suppose I lay myself open to the charge of niggling with emotions that don't really matter" (D1 259).

Woolf's not infrequent discussions of such struggles against the censorship of the sentimental suggest that the impossibility of a woman writing honestly about the body was paralleled by the impossibility of a woman speaking honestly about emotion. In each case the male censors vetoed female excess. Because these censors were "educated" and their terms of disdain included "sentimental" and "florid gush" and some were Woolf's close friends, allies, or mentors, it is not surprising that Woolf blushed and labeled her writings as "florid gush" or "a disease." Her metaphors reinforce the parallel between the female body and "female" sentiment; "florid gush" is an apt metaphor suggesting the bodily excess of the female body just as male contempt for "a sentimental lady friend" was akin to the contempt for the female body as unclean and excessive.(14)