Essay on About The Lighthouse

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Writing of the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1927, Virginia Woolf observed that there are some stories which have to be retold by each generation, not that we have anything new to add to them, but because of some queer quality in them which makes them not only Shelley s story but our own. This has proved true for the lives of any number of great men and women over the past few centuries: it has been true for no one, perhaps, as much as for Virginia Woolf herself.

In the opening of her comprehensive new biography of Woolf, British scholar Hermione Lee lists a few first sentences of other Woolf biographies: Virginia Woolf was a Miss Stephen Virginia Woolf was a sexually abused child: she was an incest survivor Was Virginia Woolf insane ? Was Virginia Woolf mad? 1 Etcetera, etcetera. What no longer seems possible, Lee writes, is to start: Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on 25 January 1882.

Why not? Evidently because her life has come to stand for a great deal; it has become a heavily loaded symbol in the current dialogues over gender, class, madness, and marriage. The famously gifted, original, neurotic, courageous, difficult, and very imperfect human being she once was has disappeared, and in its place is a secular saint.

Ms. Lee points out that all readers of Virginia Woolf s diaries (even those who have decided to dislike her) will feel an extraordinary sense of intimacy with the voice that is talking there. They will want to call her Virginia, and speak proprietorially about her life. This has proven to be so, to an extent that would have appalled the fastidious and publicity-shy novelist. Woolf s literary style, and the chatty, confidential skill with which she charmingly feminized the belletrist tradition of the previous generation, has long made readers feel they know her, while her beauty and vulner- ability have made them feel protective toward her. It is possible to see similarities between the apotheosis of Woolf and the process of canonization that is currently taking place over Princess Diana, another beautiful and vulnerable, but not exactly saintly, woman.

Feminist critics and readers and the cult of St. Virginia is due, above all, to the feminist revolution have chosen to see in Woolf the kind of martyr-heroine that substantiates present-day dogmas about male and female relations. This version of Woolf portrays her as a frail woman who invited domination. She was a victim of sexual abuse incest, even; she was oppressed by a patriarchal system personified by a devouring and controlling father; her unfortunate mental illness caused her to be further oppressed by male medicine and by a husband who jealously guarded her every move. To add insult to injury, this version has it, she continued to be victimized even after her death by her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell.

There are such layers of nonsense in this picture that it is difficult to know how to begin to scrape them away. First of all, to see Woolf as having been victimized by these men is to deny her the very considerable triumphs, both material and psychological, that her life represents. Woolf proved herself to be no victim but a tough and resourceful person who overcame the handicaps of her sex and her mental illness to a remarkable degree and carved out for herself a life of freedom, work, and friendship which would have been inconceivable to women a generation earlier. The sexual abuse so lovingly dwelt upon by today s critics, a shameful catalogue of offensive groping and fondling by her older half-brother, George Duckworth, was an unsavory fact which she confronted with unusual honesty; she was even able to joke about it with her sister Vanessa (also an object of George s ungoverned lust). The male medical treatment which Woolf received during her bouts of manic-depression was a failure not, surely, because of its gender but because the miracle of lithium had yet to be discovered. Yet the picture of Woolf as a defenseless woman imprisoned by a cabal of wicked, conniving, and incurably masculine doctors, Mariana in her moated grange, has appealed to those who seek metaphors for male domination and female oppression (or who have read a little too much Foucault). That Woolf herself did not see the situation in this light is testified to by the fact that when she fictionalized her experience in Mrs. Dalloway she made the sufferer a man.

The aspersions that have been cast by a generation of Woolf critics on Sir Leslie Stephen, Leonard Woolf, and Quentin Bell would have surprised and horrified Virginia Woolf, and rightly so. At their most extreme and destructive, commentators have agreed with Louise de Salvo s position, in Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, that Virginia Stephen was raised in a household in which incest, sexual violence, and abusive behavior were a common, rather than a singular or rare occurrence, a family in which there is evidence that virtually all were involved in incest or violence or both. Others, while not expressing themselves quite so forcefully, have deplored the influence on the delicate Virginia of the possessive and repressive men in her life.

It is true that Woolf was repelled by heterosexual sex and frequently preferred women to men as companions. Vita Sackville-West described her, interestingly, as curiously feminist: she dislikes possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact she dislikes the quality of masculinity. Yet she was deeply attached to the men in her life, attached to them, and in many ways whether her worshipers like it or not dependent upon them.

There can be no doubt that Sir Leslie Stephen was a difficult father, but he was also a loving one. His relationship with his daughter like the relationships of most parents and most children, it should be emphasized was simultaneously destructive and enriching, and Virginia Woolf responded to his egotism with a combination of love and rage. As Hermione Lee intelligently observes, Virginia wrote and rewrote her father all her life. She was in love with him, she was furious with him, she was like him, she never stopped arguing with him; and when she finally read Freud in 1939 she recognized exactly what he meant by ambivalence.

Stephen was emotionally voracious, demanding the attention, adoration, and servitude of all the women in his household: first his wife Julia, and then, after Julia s death, his stepdaughter Stella Duckworth and, to a rather lesser degree, his young daughters Vanessa and Virginia. If he had lived to ninety-six, Virginia Woolf wrote, like other people one has known, she felt that his life would have entirely ended mine. . . . No writing, no books; inconceivable. This projection is probably true: not because her father wished her ill, or begrudged her success, but because an ego so powerful tends to allow room for no other such in its immediate vicinity. Had he lived longer, Stephen would probably have been very happy for his talented younger daughter to have had a nice literary career in his style and in his shadow, ending up, ideally, as his biographer.

A bossy paterfamilias, no better or worse than most. Yet Stephen has been portrayed in recent years as a veritable Mr. Barrett of Wimpole Street, a pattern of oppressive Victorian patriarchy. His detached and rather unsympathetic treatment of Virginia s retarded half-sister, Laura Stephen a treatment normal, alas, for the period and never challenged by Virginia, either during her childhood or later is used to add color and menace to the devilish picture. Even Hermione Lee, a fine critic and meticulous biographer, feels compelled to apologize for his excesses of patriarchal behavior. Indeed, one grows thoroughly sick of the word patriarchy before many pages of Virginia Woolf have gone by: Lee is by no means immune to the glamour of academic jargon, and she even resorts to the disgusting affectation of using parentheses between words, as in (en)treaties.

To reduce Stephen to a catalogue of oppressive and patriarchal values is to paint a figure that would have been unrecognizable to his contemporaries or even to his family. Although he had settled into a crusty and pessimistic middle age by the time his youngest daughter knew him, he had been in his time a highly influential radical, a supporter of Irish independence, Church disestablishment, and parliamentary reform. For some young men, writes Lee, he paved the way (like his beloved Meredith, like Gissing or Samuel Butler . . .) for the intellectual revolutions of the next century.

Perhaps if we are to settle on any definitive portrait of Sir Leslie Stephen at least insofar as he figures in the life of his daughter Virginia it should be Virginia s own portrait of him as Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Only the most unresponsive reader could feel the self-indulgence and bombast of Mr. Ramsay without also feeling the softness and the dependence, could respond to the anger in the portrait without divining the helpless love. Mr. Ramsay is a critical and mocking comment on Sir Leslie Stephen, but he is also a deeply affectionate one, and anyone who fails to recognize the fact must be so patently dense that he, or she, should not be allowed to claim the title of literary critic.

The late Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf s much-loved nephew, enjoyed a privileged relationship with his aunt throughout his youth; after Leonard Woolf s death he probably remembered her better than any person still living. His Virginia Woolf (1972), intelligent and humane, affectionate but unsparing, is one of the great masterpieces of the genre; it was also considered the definitive Woolf biography until the appearance of Ms. Lee s. As such it inevitably came under fire as a phallocentric document from the feminist critics who seek to deliver their heroine from male hands. Hostile critics like Jane Marcus have railed against Bell, the obsolete sexist who, they contend, sought to define and misrepresent their Virginia. Bell was attacked for every even slightly unflattering thing he said about his aunt. He was attacked for the crime of being a man attempting to write about a woman. He committed the ultimate sin, though, when he stated that Virginia Woolf was not a feminist.

Well of course, that depends on just what your definition of feminism is, as any idiot should be able to figure out. Bell, coming from a different generation and tradition from his younger, largely American critics, probably adhered to the rather narrow notion that feminists are overtly political, strident, often mannish. Virginia Woolf did not attach her name to political causes; she was ambivalent about votes for women, and did not join the suffragist struggle; she was, in spite of her unconventional sex life, an intensely feminine person. A more catholic definition of feminism, one that would accept as both feminist and beneficial the great revolution that over the course of the last hundred and fifty years has allowed women the fundamental right to control their own lives and income, would have to classify Virginia Woolf not only as a feminist but as one of the most important feminists of our era: as the author of A Room of One s Own alone, she has exerted an unparalleled imaginative influence on feminist thought.

It is all a question of definition, and if the question were put to him, Quentin Bell would surely have agreed that if his aunt were not the first sort of feminist, she was most undoubtedly the second. However he might define feminist, Bell wrote of his aunt with extraordinary grace and insight. He wrote with love, yet accepted that his aunt did not always behave in a lovable fashion. He included every wart, while painting a complete portrait in which the overwhelming impression was of singular beauty. Yet Woolf s self-proclaimed defenders cannot forgive Bell for having included any unattractive features at all. What could he know about her, anyway? He was only a man. How dare he claim to define, to own, to criticize, their exalted Virginia?

Even Hermione Lee goes along with this school of thought.

As they grew up, the [Bell] children conspired with their parents to create a family image of Virginia Woolf as the batty, playful, malicious, untrustworthy, eccentric genius. The letters between the children about Virginia always strike this note; it lingers on into Quentin Bell s biography, and has greatly influenced the British reading of her life.

There is a great deal of truth in this image, however, and nowhere in her 760-page biography does Lee really succeed in dislodging it. Virginia Woolf was playful, untrustworthy, and eccentric; it is what makes her impossible to define and pin down, as current feminist critics would so much like to do. She was also, beyond any doubt, snobbish and malicious. Were she by some magic able to come back to life, there can be no doubt that among the first victims of her snobbery and her malice would be the earnest and political academics who claim her for their own.

The third perceived maleficent male in Virginia Woolf s life was the one she cared for the most: her husband. It is my opinion after reading both Bell and Lee that Leonard Woolf was one of the most devoted and long-suffering husbands in history. Romantically in love with his wife, he agreed, shortly after marriage, with her decision that they forego sexual relations, which were intolerable to her. His assiduous care undoubtedly kept her out of mental institutions and allowed her to have a productive and creative life. He took pride in her talent and intellect and encouraged her to exercise them to the utmost; he suppressed his own ego, judging her work to be more important than his own. It is true that he pushed for a quiet life in the country when she would have preferred the excitement of London, and that he made clear his opinion that they had better not have children. But on balance Leonard must be seen as having been tremendously beneficial to his wife, a fact that her final letter to him bears out: I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. . . . No one could have been so good as you have been.

Of course, it is possible to go overboard in praising this unconventional marriage. Lee pooh-poohs the idea that the Woolfs marriage might have been lacking in some essential element, blaming standard assumptions about what a full-blooded sexual life needed to consist of. Are these standard assumptions so very wrong, then? I don t think so. And I find the Woolfs pseudo-sexual fantasy life, in which they took on the personae of cuddly animals, revolting. ( In their secret play Leonard was often the little stringy creature, the mongoose, the Servant, and she was the big mandril, goddess or mistress. Ugh! These, like so many revelations about the sex lives of the Bloomsburyites, are details that posterity could well have lived without.)

Still, whatever their initial motivations might have been, Leonard and Virginia chose each other and stood by their choice unwaveringly. They tried, as Lee points out, to reshape the possibilities of marriage, and to a large extent they succeeded. For Leonard to be calumniated as a parasite feeding on his wife s genius, a domestic tyrant who controlled her every move and kept her in an emotional prison, is a libelous disgrace.

The truth is that critics like Jane Marcus and Elaine Showalter seem unable to accept the fact that Virginia Woolf decided to marry and to place herself in a position of considerable emotional dependency upon a man. The fact that a woman who so passionately sought independence on one level while shrinking from it on another seems too hard for the literal-minded, who expect their heroes never to behave unheroically, to stretch their imaginations around.

The process of canonization of St. Virginia has turned Woolf into an untouchable figure she was not and could never be, and has obscured the imperfect and vastly more interesting reality. She was a powerful, important, and revolutionary writer but not, in my opinion, one of the very greatest. Her dislike for the vulgarity she perceived on first reading the manuscript of Ulysses indicates her own great failing, for an artist who is afraid of being vulgar will always be handicapped. Her avoidance of vulgarity led her too often to vulgarity s opposite, and far more serious, sins: preciosity and fancy. Her recognition, however, of Joyce s show- offishness indicates one of her own strengths: she did not use her work for ostentation; she undertook her literary experiments with a sincere desire to achieve new effects, to translate the immediacy of experience to the page more exactly than had ever been done before. She was the author of a masterpiece of art, To the Lighthouse, and a masterpiece of polemic, A Room of One s Own; an excellent but not whol- ly successful novel, Mrs. Dalloway; and a number of interesting but not immortal experimental novels. She was also indisputably one of the greatest literary critics of the last two...

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