Making of a New Virginia Woolf Icon, The

College Literature, Summer 2005 by Clewell, Tammy

The originality of Humm's book derives from her treatment of the photography of family and friends that Woolf often took and developed, sometimes collected from others, and arranged in photo albums. Critics have addressed the way Woolf s fiction includes references to some of these images, but Humm is the first to regard the albums "as artefacts in their own right" (2003, 41). Woolf, a camera owner by the age of fifteen, used photographs for a variety of purposes: to share reflections and understand domestic relationships, forge new relationships, stave off mental illness, and help her write. Even more significantly, Humm draws on post-Lacanian psychoanalyst and artist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, whose work focuses on artistic reconstructions of maternal memories, to advance her central argument: Woolf 's albums not only demonstrate her interest in formal aesthetics; they also suggest the importance of unconscious psychic investments by drawing on family memories, particularly memories of her mother, Julia Stephen, as a shaping force.

Through archival research of the seven Monk's House albums and two hundred loose photographs (housed at the Harvard Theater Library), Hunim demonstrates that Woolf s photography, photographic preferences, and album making function as an unconscious testimony to her childhood past. By engaging maternal memories complicated by Julia Stephen's premature death, Woolf s albums suggest "a past which haunts the present rather than a past which precedes the present" (2003, 57). The arrangement of photographs in Woolf 's albums typically breaks with chronology. The interspersing of Victorian family photographs with contemporary pictures indicates the importance of temporal disjuncture to Woolf s notion of identity. An 1892 photograph of Julia, Leslie, and Virginia Stephen in theTalland House Library in St. Ives, one of forty-five black and white images illustrating Humm's book, contains photographic details or "trauma fragments" as Humni calls them, that determine a host of Woolf s later photographic choices. The position of sitters, furniture selection, presence of windows and doors, and placement of flowers in the family image appear again and again in the later photographs Woolf took and selected for albums, evidencing the impact of familial and maternal memories on her photographic work.

Humm provides a rich catalog of the repetition of Woolf's optical unconscious; however, she sometimes comes dangerously close to reducing Woolf's visual practice to a nostalgic impulse or even a pathological inability to mourn the lost mother. Humm characterizes Woolf's albums as a "nostalgic retrieval" that seeks to recover the loss of an idealized past (10); she also suggests that both Woolf and Bell "'refuse' their mother's death by constantly revivifying the maternal in art" (2003, 86). For the most part, however, Humm does not treat Woolf's albums as a symptom of the kind of nostalgia that theorists of the postmodern including Jean-François Lyotard have leveled against modernism (1984, 81) or of the mental maladjustments of failed mourning that an earlier generation of Woolf critics such as Mark Spilka (1980, 7) and Elaine Showalter (1977, 264) saw as marring Woolf's work. In Humm's more compelling thesis, Woolf's albums reflect a personal and cultural achievement with wide-ranging significance: "The albums represent an encounter with maternal memories that gives meaning 'to a real which might otherwise pass by unthinkable, unnoticed and unrecognized'" (2003, 79). Woolf's album making, Humm enables us to understand, transforms the haunting of the dead mother into a creative principle of visual production. This same attention to the domestic and maternal governs Vanessa Bell's construction often family albums. By far the most interesting aspect of Humm's chapter on Bell concerns erotic photographs she took of her naked children, photographs that Humm makes a persuasive case for reading as "innocently erotic" (2003,123). Like B ell, Woolf develops a visual practice that places the domestic and maternal on equal footing with the artistic and aesthetic.