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

College Literature, Summer 2005 by Clements, Elicia

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." (Nicolson 1978, 4:399)

In a subsequent letter, Woolf suggests that the Shaw quotation describes the loss of "the egotistic self" (4:400), precisely a capacity that Woolf claimed Smyth was often lacking. Thus, when Smyth suggests to Woolf that her novel should have a "moral" center, Woolf responds, ambiguously even through Shaw's words, that "true joy in life" (4:399) is the loss of a unified or "egotistic" self, thus counterpointing Smyth with a destabilized notion of subjectivity rather than one capable of a solidified ethics and all of its implied authority.

Smyth also elicits Woolf 's respect for difference, as though their relationship, fraught with both deep admiration and respect as well as turbulent disagreements, is an exercise in simultaneous unity and dispersion:" I recognise differences [she declares to Smyth in 1934]-always have-but I don't let them separate; in fact, so contrary are human souls, they serve to ally. I don't require a repetition ofV.W [sic]-not at all: what I want is a contradiction" (Nicolson 1979, 5:293). Woolf was able to disagree-fervently-with Smyth and still maintain their valuable bond.3

Smyth's personality and experiences are found in almost all of Woolf's major texts from the time they meet, in 1930, until Woolf's death in 1941, and they often evoke the intersection of community and subjectivity. Explicit allusion begins in Woolf's speech to the London National Society for Women's Service in 1931; under the title "Music and Literature" the two artists shared a platform on the occasion. In her paper, Woolf describes Smyth as "a blaster of rocks and the maker of bridges" (Leaska 1978, xxviii). As a militant suffragette in the years 1911-13, Smyth spent three weeks in prison for throwing a brick through the window of a prominent politician's home. Mitchel Leaska documents that Woolf's speech to the Society would be the inspiration for both TheYears and Three Guineas.4 In turn, these works would reproduce and reread Smyth both as a figure (Woolf depicts her as Rose Pargiter), and as the nexus of issues Smyth actualized: suffrage, feminism, and women's professionalism.

Both Virginia and Leonard Woolf, after the Women's League event, admire Smyth's ability to "liquidate [her] whole personality in speaking" (Nicolson 1978, 4:280). Woolf notes that Smyth "threw in something never yet written by being yourself there in the flesh" (4:280). Similarly, in 1932, when Smyth is planning a lecture at King's College, London, Woolf regrets she can not attend, stating,"! should like to hear you, with your gift for solidifying the connection between you and the audience" (1979, 5:13). In a sketch of Smyth in Woolf's diary one observes Woolf's pending shift in focus from the multiplicity of singular subjects to her radicalization of social organization and its link to Smyth. Early in their relationship Smyth informs Woolf, "Tm in the street. I belong to the crowd. I say the crowd is right'" (qtd. in Bell 1980, 3:292), prompting Woolf to ponder, "perhaps she is right to belong to the crowd" (3: 292). Woolf is questioning the subject's imbrication in social circumstances, an idea that will circulate in Between the Acts to suggest that those in the "crowd" are both produced by and producers of social systematization. The references cited above suggest that Smyth and ideas of community, audience, and subjectivity are interconnected.