Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music: Listening as a Productive Mode of Social Interaction

College Literature, Summer 2005 by Clements, Elicia

On Christmas Eve 1940, just three months before her death, Virginia Woolf wrote to Dame Ethel Smyth, a good friend and then-contemporary composer of opera: "Yes, I will come one day soon. Because I must exchange ideas" (Nicolson 1980, 6:454). Listening to the exchange of ideas between Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) reveals that the relationship enabledWoolf to make new connections between art and subjectivity. Encountering Smyth as an engaged intellectual and a musician, getting to know and to disagree with her, became part of Woolf s elaboration of new forms of being and writing. More specifically, Smyth was a friend and artistic colleague through whom Woolf radicalized her own ideas about subjectivity, society, and sound. Although Smyth did not influence Woolf 's musical thinking directly-Smyth and Woolf did not explicitly theorize artistic principles of music and literature-the relationship did affect Woolf 's ideas about sound and community, both of which were already prevalent in her work at the time Woolf and Smyth met in 1930. The interchange between Woolf and Smyth, therefore, reverberates in Woolf 's thinking about what constitutes both cultural and social meaning.

The first half of this paper demonstrates the effect of the relationship between Woolf and Smyth on Woolf's artistic ideas, which manifests in three primary ways: an expanded sense of subjectivity; a heightened respect for difference; and, a reconfiguration of the notion of community. Woolf's understanding of music is also surprisingly similar to the way she comprehends her friend and colleague. The second half of the paper, therefore, is an examination of how these issues-subjectivity, difference, and community-emerge in Between the Acts, as Miss La Trobe, the central character who is modeled on Smyth,1 and music become crucial components of the text. Just as Woolf listened to her friend both critically and compassionately, Between the Acts asks the reader to hear the many voices within it in order to elicit the same productive mode of communal interaction: apperceptive listening.

Exchanging/Engaging Ideas

Writing to Ottoline Morrell about Woolf in 1935, Smyth reflected,'"it seems to me that the life of intercourse is interchange'" (qtd. Marcus 1977a, 6). These comments prompt questions regarding the potential rewards such an exchange between author and composer might produce. Did this significant relationship, which consisted of almost weekly letters for the last ten years of Woolf's life, invigorate Woolf's reconfigurations of fictional subjectivity and community in her final novels? What effect, given that Smyth was a composer, did this correspondence have on Woolf's figurative and narrative utilization of music, especially conspicuous in Between the Acts'?

Several critics have argued for the importance of the relationship between these two feminist thinkers: Jane Marcus (1984) asserts that Smyth was a mothering figure for Woolf; Suzanne Raitt (1988) contends that the friendship elicited personal narratives of the self from Woolf; and, more recently, Alison Ames Galstad (1996) details a biographical portrait of Smyth. Hermoine Lee's section on Ethel Smyth in her biography ofWoolf (1996) is commendably comprehensive and asserts the significance of the relationship for Woolf's imagination. Patricia Moran (1998) explores these artists' mutual concern with and pleasure in female same-sex desire. Most recently,Vanessa Curtis (2002) also documents the biographical links between the artists. Smyth undoubtedly engaged Woolf s creative thought.

Woolf composes numerous versions of Smyth in her diaries and her fictions. Notably, in the early 1930s, her portraits fracture Smyth's image, "shiver into splinters the old vision" (1998a, 164). After one of their early encounters, Woolf observes,

Lying in my chair in the firelight she looked 18; she looked a young vigorous handsome woman. Suddenly this vanishes; then there is the old crag that has been beaten on by the waves. [.. .] Then, she is worldly; by which I mean something I like; unembarrassed, aired, sunned, acquainted with this way of life & that; lived in many societies; taken her own way in shirt & tie vigorously unimpeded. (BeU 1980, 3:313)

Detecting several different versions of her friend, Woolf merges three disparate personality types into one account. Smyth is simultaneously a young woman, an aged woman, and a robust public figure. Woolf continued to pen portraits of Smyth in which the qualities of sincerity, forthrightness, and courage figure most prominently, juxtaposed with comedic exclamations of her haphazard appearance, and abrasive and thunderous manner.

Woolf also attended several concerts at which Smyth conducted her own music. As she tells Smyth in May 1930, she hears the multiplicity of Smyth's subjectivity in her music. Admiring her "spontaneity and ruthlessness," Woolf comments,

Thats [sic] what I call living; thats [sic] the quality I would give my eyes to possess. Of course, in my furtive and sidelong way (being like a flat fish with eyes not in the usual place) I had read a good deal of this years ago in your books, and now I begin to read it and other oddities and revelations too in your music. It will take a long time not merely because I am musically so feeble, but because all my faculties are so industriously bringing in news of so many Ethels at the same moment. (Nicolson 1978, 4:172)