Reality and Virginia Woolf

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2003 by Phillips, Brian

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We are wrong, of course. For the reading is too emphatic; it ignores too much. Woolf herself saw experience as "a semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." No one is going to mistake the writer of those lines for Anthony Trollope. No one will see in her grotesques the obscene Rabelaisian relish lavished by Joyce. And yet the notion of Woolf as a writer of grotesques and odd details is interestingly corrective, for these elements, though not central to her work, are present in her work. We tend to ignore them, but we are wrong to ignore them. There is a sense in which we have lost the habit of reading Woolf through. Our expectations confound our eyes. We expect a certain method, a certain effect, something to do with a luminous halo, and it lights up when we see it. When we see its opposite, the sentence goes dark, and we silently exclude it. We see "Austen"; we muffle "Byron" in a blanket. Our insistence on evanescence, consciousness and diaphanous impressionism distorts the book that forms in our minds, like the slight misimpression on the pottery wheel that tilts the eventual cup. Many new readers of Woolf are left cold by the novels and warm only to the funny and malicious caricatures in the diaries: it is possible to detect in this progress an easing into the unmistakable, a relief from the strain of misreading. The very covers of her books-with their lit-up women's faces, their shafts of light passing through the brim of a hat or the gauze of a sleeve; with their deep, still backgrounds, the color of bruised fruit; with their supple textures, softly sueded like the petal of a flower-quietly introduce the emphasis into our reading.

Part of the blame for this excess of impression may be attributed to the inclusion of Woolf in a certain idea of Bloomsbury modernism which is never as interesting as she is-the recognizable stereotype in which young men in straw boater hats read Anaxagoras aloud on the picnic blanket, paint decorative still lives of fruit baskets, and make overtures to one another while the young women are having epiphanies in the blue half-light among the escallonia blossoms. Woolf's social life may have involved her in that world, but her art has very little to do with it, and when she occasionally depicts it in her writing (at certain points in The Voyage Out, for instance) she almost invariably does so with humor. Another part of the blame surely falls to feminist literary criticism, which, when it has ventured from the political to the aesthetic, has tended to focus on patterns of imagery in her work which are thought of as traditionally feminine: again, light, water, clouds; the shifting and shapeless forms with which Woolf counters rigid patriarchal stabilities. This fractional reading has been reinforced by critics who, eager to oppose the feminists on general grounds, accept their reading of Woolf's qualities, then attack her for possessing them. But most of the blame for the popular perception of Woolf must fall to Woolf herself, for having so vividly represented her own personality on the page. For the popular conception of her personality is oddly incompatible with the more robust strain present in her work.