Reality and Virginia Woolf

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2003 by Phillips, Brian

The point may seem trivially obvious, but it actually bears repeating. The books are full of things. It is important to remember this, because the popular impression of Woolf, and the impression given by much criticism, is that her fiction is somehow formed from pure thought, and that reality in her fiction is inevitably represented by the incandescent, liquid and aerial images in which she tends to stress the motions of thought in time. Yet the sheep's jaw Jacob sleeps with, the boots in which Mr. Ramsay takes such childish pride, the Moor's head swinging from the attic rafters in Orlando, are only among the more memorable articles in a robustly detailed world, a world strewn with abundance. One of the chief pleasures of reading Dickens is also present in Woolf: the pleasure of watching people interact with their possessions, the pleasure of seeing what people do with things. There is an odd sympathy between Mr. Ramsay's boots and Mrs. Gamp's bandboxes; and the easy largesse of detail with which Dickens gives us Mr. Dolloby's pipe, which Mr. Dolloby stands on its head by the doorpost before he goes into the shop, is echoed m Jacob's Room by the paintbrush of Charles Steele, suspended over the canvas, trembling "like the antenna of some irritable insect." Woolf learned from Dickens how character can be found in the way people use and handle objects. She saw for herself how objects can interfere and interact with thought, how things, not feelings, are thought's most common concern. In the novels thought is always taking off from an object or running up against one. Objects preoccupy thought in the abstract (Andrew's shorthand for Mr. Ramsay's metaphysical work: "Think of a kitchen table when you're not there"), reveal inner attitudes (the "compound of severity and humour" with which Mr. Ramsay flicks water from a sprig onto his young son's leg), and distract the progress of thought from its course, the way Bernard finds, in The Waves, that his grief for the dead Percival has been interrupted by a newspaper headline announcing the divorce of a famous actress. The world we see is subject to our mental states, but our mental states are subject to the crowded, fantastic, and unpredictable outside world.

The moment we begin to stress the fact of the physical in Woolf-her gargoyles, her odd details, her endlessly surprising everyday objects-an eccentric, hybrid, semi-Victorian figure begins to emerge. We see a writer whose innovations in portraying consciousness create not the open space and light with which she is associated, but a world of dark corners perpetually being filled by branching entanglements of reality and thought. We recall that Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a famous Victorian intellectual, and that his first wife was Thackeray's daughter. (Woolf's mad half-sister Laura, a fixture in Woolf's childhood before she was finally institutionalized, was Thackeray's grandchild.) We recall that many of Woolf's characters are caricatures-the touching and comical relationship between Betty Flanders and the Captain in Jacob's Room is a small and scarcely noted triumph in her fiction-and we recall the glazed cadence of her sentences, slick with Victorian residue. We recall how thoroughly the essays chronicle her obsession with the literary and the historical past. The innovative, the feminist, the radical Bloomsbury modernist recedes, and we see the reader of George Eliot and Thomas Browne, of Coleridge and the Elizabethans, who attended Queen Victoria's Diamond jubilee at the age of fifteen, in 1897, and recorded the event in her diary. We see nineteenth-century London. We have discovered the shadow of a Dickensian Woolf.