Making of a New Virginia Woolf Icon, The

College Literature, Summer 2005 by Clewell, Tammy

An image of a socially engaged woman emerges in Black's discussion of Woolf's involvement with a number of British women's organizations.Woolf maintained personal contacts, gave lectures, or prepared mailings for such groups as the People's Suffrage Federation, the Women's Co-operative Guild, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and the London and National Society for Women's Service. While cautioning against an overestimation of the extent ofWoolf's work with these groups, Black defines her feminist activism as a function of her writing, remarking that Three Guineas presents goals for social change shared by women's political and social organizations.

Over and against views of Three Guineas as a pacifist treatise about the horrors of war, Black raises her main argument about Woolf's book: "For her, war is only one of the products, admittedly one of the worst products, of a system of power and domination that has its roots in gender hierarchy" (2004, 7). In interpreting Three Guineas as a statement, first and foremost, of Woolf's feminism, Black offers evidence from the long and complicated evolution of the text, in addition to accessing its multiple editions. A 1931 lecture about women, writing, and professions became the basis for a 1932 "essay-novel" published posthumously under Woolf's working title, The Pargiters. By 1935, this abandoned text about the social limits placed on women developed into two separate projects, The Years and Three Guineas. It was also in 1935, when fascism arose as a pressing public concern, that Woolf addressed the issue, not only articulating a version of feminism that stressed the effect on women of paternal power, economic dependency, and limited education, but also contending that fascism abroad was an extreme version of sexism at home. In evaluating the British and American editions of Three Guineas, Black emphasizes the similarity between the two, although she does read an additional sentence in the later American edition as making a stronger feminist statement. Conversely, when Woolf cut and substantially rewrote the text for serial publication in the Atlantic Monthly, she laid new emphasis on the case against war and tempered the confrontational tone of her feminist arguments, potentially creating the false impression that she rejected feminism.

Black, editor of a critical edition of Three Guineas, provides an excellent account of the textual evolution and development ofWoolf's feminism; less compelling, however, is the lesson she draws when turning to the reception history of Three Guineas. Some ofWoolf's contemporaries, both critics and friends, expressed relatively harsh responses to the book's analysis of war. For her nephew Quentin Bell, Woolf's claim about combating the fascist war threat by redressing women's oppression at home seemed wholly inadequate. Bell makes this point while evoking the Spanish Civil War photographs of dead children and destroyed buildings that Woolf describes in the text, contending that grieving Madrid mothers would have rejected the arguments in Three Guineas. Black discounts Bell's argument in the same manner as she dismisses Susan Sontag's recent critique of Woolf s description of the war photos: she charges those critical of the text's war analysis with sexism. "It is to be expected," Black writes, "that readers unsympathetic to feminism should be baffled or hostile" to Woolf s book (2004, 153). And yet, self-identified feminists might have agreed with Bell, who sided with a military response to the siege of Madrid, just as contemporary readers might agree with Sontag, who acknowledges with Woolf that war has a gender and it is predominantly male, but who also uncovers certain limits in Woolf's discussion of the war images: "To read in the pictures, as Woolf does, only what confirms a general abhorrence of war is to stand back from an engagement with Spain as a country with a history. It is to dismiss politics" (2003, 9). Black certainly succeeds in making a strong case for reading Three Guineas not as Woolf's pacifist plea but her most coherent and sustained feminist statement. Given the very persuasiveness of her argument, Black's readers may wish for a more sustained discussion of the way Woolf's commitment to feminist social reform affected or perhaps limited her analysis of impending war, especially in light of the fact, as Black notes in passing, that Woolf came to support military intervention against Hitler after the publication of Three Guineas.