Making of a New Virginia Woolf Icon, The

College Literature, Summer 2005 by Clewell, Tammy

The Making of a New Virginia Woolf Icon Black, Naomi. 2004. Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. $47.50 he. $19.95 sc. xiv 247 pp.

Cuddy-Keane, Melba. 2003. Virginia Woolf, The Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $60.00 he. x 237 pp.

Humm, Maggie. 2003. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography, and Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. $60.00 he. $24.00 sc. xii 244 pp.

Virginia Woolf achieved a level of public recognition and popular success in her lifetime; her novel The Years was a 1937 bestseller in the United States and she appeared in the same year on the cover of Time magazine. It was not until the 1960s, however, that Woolf became a celebrity, even a household name, thanks in large part to Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? As readers of Brenda Silver's richly detailed study of Woolf s emergence as a cultural icon have been made aware, Albee's play managed to create a public image of Woolf largely independent of her life and writing, an image that has given rise to a proliferation of multiple and often hotly contested other images that link Woolf to social anxiety and fear about the changing significations of gender, class, art, and sexuality. One of the most important stories that Silver tells about Woolf s debated status as an icon is the way the intellectual media responded to 1970s academic feminists who succeeded in canonizing Woolf as an opponent of patriarchal society. During the culture wars of the 1980s, the New York Review of Books, among other media that critiqued the academy and feminism, laid claim to Woolf as a representative of Western civilization. In this version, Woolf circulates as a priestess of the power of great books and universal values; she is made to appear, in Silver's words, "as a preserver of a high culture threatened by both the academy and popular/mass culture" (1999, 25). Silver is certainly right in arguing thatWoolf's ability to cross borders defies any effort to limit or fix her image in a story that has far from ended, and whose latest chapters render her as fashion icon, postfeminist, and emblem of queer culture. Nevertheless, the representation of Woolf that has proven most resistant to revision both inside and outside the academy may well be the image of a cultural highbrow whose literary achievements are thought to be immune from ideological, political, and commercial contaminants.

It is this lingering construction ofWoolf as an rarified aesthete, an image recently reiterated by Nicole Kidman's portrayal of Woolf in The Hours, as marvelous as that portrayal may be, that three well-established Woolf scholars variously seek to challenge. In contesting the characterization ofWoolf as an ivory-tower elitist, these critics move away from a study of the literary works that limit her to high modernism and focus, instead, on a number of her other personal and public projects. They offer diverse accounts: Woolf appears in Humm's book as an enthusiastic participant in the popular cultures burgeoning around photography and cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, in Black's account as a radical feminist connected in important ways to British women's political and social organizations, and in Cuddy-Keane's analysis as a public intellectual engaged in widely debated issues about highbrow intellectualism, reading, and education. These studies do more than contribute to our knowledge of the extra-literary facets of Woolf's life and work; when considered together, they create a remarkably uniform image, a Woolf icon for our time that reveals a much more democratic and socially engaged woman than has previously been thought, a writer committed not only to aesthetic pursuits but also to the most pressing domestic and political issues of her day.

Of the three studies, Humm's Modernist Women and Visual Cultures has the most relevance for our understanding of Woolf s fiction; her account of the way that Woolf and other women participated in early twentieth-century visual cultures offers nothing less than a challenge to reigning accounts of modernist aesthetics. The story of modernism, based on canonical male works, has long been one of avant-garde movements that celebrate artistic autonomy and formal complexity, while eschewing commercialism and popular culture. This account has shaped feminist evaluations of female writers. By utilizing an insider/outsider paradigm that places female modernism at the margins of the modernist mainstream, feminist critics since the 197Os have articulated how women's challenges to male modernism succeed in blurring the opposition between art and life. Humm aligns herself with feminism, but she also addresses the limit of this approach: "So that while decades of feminist contestations have transformed our knowledge and understanding of modernist women's texts, the major work of re-evaluation has not refigured the terrain of modernism itself quite so radically" (2003, 157). Pitching her study as just such a refiguring, Humm focuses on the domestic photography and photo albums ofWoolf and her sisterVanessa Bell, the writings about cinema by Colette, H.D., Dorothy Richardson,Woolf, and others, and the function of photography in Woolf 's Three Guineas. By refusing the opposition that pits patrilineal modernism against marginal women, she demonstrates how photography and cinema provided Woolf and modernist women with opportunities to "explore gender issues in a perhaps freer way than in their better-known work" (2003, 4). Female modernists, as Humm's study establishes, employ visual technologies in ways that emphasize domestic and everyday experiences.