Reality and Virginia Woolf

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2003 by Phillips, Brian

In her extraordinary essay "Reading," written in 1919 but not published until after her death, Woolf writes her most lyrical treatment of the close and painful connections between literature, reality, and the self. The scenes of the essay shift over a sustained double metaphor of history and discovery. It begins with a speaker, Woolf's surrogate, a girl apparently in early adolescence, reading on the lawn of a great Victorian home-possibly Talland House, the Stephen family's summer retreat during Woolf's childhood and the source for the setting of To the Lighthouse. As the girl reads, she holds the book against the late summer background, so that the lines on the page seem to be printed directly on reality: "instead of being a book it seemed as if what I read was laid upon the landscape not printed, bound, or sewn up, but somehow the product of trees and fields and the hot summer sky, like the air which swam, on fine mornings, round the outlines of things." She lies on the lawn all day, reading Elizabethan family histories and Hakluyt's chronicle of voyages of discovery. Then (it is an extraordinary thing in an essay called "Reading") she puts down the book. It is too dark to read. The past has so swollen in her that the books she has looked in feel ripe to the touch. While their parents are busy with dinner, she and her siblings venture out into the forest, in the deep dark, to go hunting for moths. Their journey, like that of the Elizabethan explorers, is portrayed as a voyage beyond known things, into "the gloom of the unknown." Kept together only by the fine thread of light from the lantern, they penetrate into the forest, where they see insects in the lantern light that remind them of sea creatures crawling on the ocean floor. At last they reach the place where, about an hour earlier, "several pieces of flannel soaked in rum and sugar had been pinned to a number of trees" to attract moths. In the lantern beam they see moths on the traps, their probosces "deeply plunged, and as they drew in the sweetness, their wings quivered slightly as if in ecstasy." They tap the drunken moths into the poison jar. At last they find a huge moth with "great underwings of glowing crimson" who is so extraordinary that they cannot bring themselves to kill him. He flies away, and they must force themselves to go to the furthest tree out, which seems to stand "on the very verge of the world." There they find the scarlet underwing, "astride a vein of sweetness, drinking deep." This time they capture and kill him, and then they return home through the forest. In the light of the next morning things seem different, and the girl needs a new kind of reading material. She takes up Sir Thomas Browne, a writer who, she says, began the great process of inner discovery, the voyage into the self.

The speaker of this essay first reads about discovery in Hakluyt's chronicle, then ventures out to make her own exploration, where she discovers the moths. (She has also read family chronicles, and her narrative of the journey into the woods is itself a moving recollection of hunting for moths with her siblings.) She is then prepared to read the writer who, in the "dark world" of the soul, "was one of the explorers; the first to talk of himself." The chronicle of discovery in the world is transformed into an act of discovery in the world, which in turn affects the girl so that she chooses to read a chronicle of internal exploration. This will no doubt be transformed in a similar way; as the essay concludes, Woolf writes that Browne achieves a kind of beauty that "leaves in the mind a desire to impart; some offering we must make." The essay, of course, is the offering. In this way are writing and reading, reality and self-consciousness, bound up.