After Hours: Woolf’s Literary Legacy
Marjorie Worthington
Bradley University
worthing@bradley.edu
Authorial Retreats and Intrusions: Woolf as Catalyst to Metafiction
“Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance.” A Room of One’s Own
These words highlight Woolf’s well-known effort to maintain a distance between her work and her authorial presence. Her narrators are more poetic “speakers” than autobiographical elements of her self or references to her own life. One of the reasons she gave for maintaining this distance is to imbue her work with more authority; she believed that speaking in general terms would lend her arguments and ideas more credence than if it were known that she was talking about herself. Many contemporary women writers take this separation of artist and work one step further, separating the work from its narrator, often leaving the reader uncertain about who is speaking, who is constructing the narrative we read, or to whose point of view we are privy. Instead of solidifying authorial authority, this process, employed by authors like Carole Maso, Jeanette Winterson and Kathy Acker, serves to call the very notion of such authority into question.
Andy Schopp
University of Tennessee at Martin and Nassau Community College
aschopp@utm.edu
“Embracing ‘Dreadful Beauty’: Death and Beauty in Woolf, Morrison and Cunningham.”
While Michael Cunningham’s The Hours explicitly reworks Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, it might seem odd to suggest that Toni Morrison’s novel Sula might also serve either as a reworking of the novel, or as a novel that reflects a Woolfian influence. Morrison’s work is often compared to a modernist author, but one from across the Atlantic, i.e., William Faulkner. Morrison’s aesthetic in Sula does, however, speak to issues central to both Woolf’s novel and Cunningham’s text, namely the relationship between death and beauty and the conflict between “reality” and the constructed world we often accept as real. In this paper, I will explore how all three texts interrogate the relationship between death and beauty. I will also examine each novel’s aesthetic, and specifically the often beautiful visions of death that each employs.
Karen Lee Osborne
Columbia College of Chicago
kosborne@colum.edu
“Fluid Subjectivities in Woolf’s The Waves and Maso’s AVA”
American novelist Carole Maso has frequently acknowledged the influence of Virginia Woolf. Both Maso and Woolf employ the figural, as Lyotard defines it, rather than “figuration” or mimetic representation. The figural conveys sensation directly. Maso writes what she calls “lyrical fiction,” often rejecting linear plot and other conventions. Karen Kaivola has argued that lyrical fiction provides “an opportunity for female experiences of subjectivity” and can articulate structures oppressive to women and express “an impossible longing to escape these structures” (emphasis added). Both Woolf and Maso dramatize this impossible longing, which evokes what I call the evanescent subject, the floating subject, the subject in flight. Lyrical prose produces sensations that destabilize notions of identity along with linear narrative. Further, I contend that syncope, as Catherine Clement describes it, where boundaries of time and space are destabilized, is especially relevant to these novels. Lyrical fiction’s syncopic stopping of time prolongs the lyric moment and produces the figural sensation of an impossible longing. Both The Waves and AVA follow a progression from morning until night, but AVA’s narrative is more fragmented, more thoroughly destabilizing narrative and subjectivity.
Laurie Vickroy
Bradley University
vick@bradley.edu
A Legacy of Pacifism: Virginia Woolf and Pat Barker
Though over fifty years separates the careers of Modernist Virginia Woolf and contemporary novelist Pat Barker, they share many social and political concerns and through their gendered analyses of the destructiveness of war they become practitioners of ethical literature. Both have articulated goals of engaging public discourse that confronts destructive traditions and institutions. World War I, or the Great War, is exemplary of this destructiveness for both writers. A pacifist during the war, as were many of her Bloomsbury comrades, Woolf was appalled at the nationalist war hysteria sweeping England at the time. Barker still returns to World War I in the 1990s both as a lingering historical trauma (still haunting her parents’ generation and beyond) and as an indicator of the coming attenuation of class and gender hierarchies. Their portraits of traumatized war veterans, Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Billy Prior (among others) in Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991-95) are focal points for how war destroys life and individual humanity. Both writers were influenced by anti-war veteran poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Woolf based aspects of Septimus directly on things Sassoon told her, and Sassoon and Owen appear as characters in Barker’s trilogy. Their poetry articulated the nature of loss amidst war and assailed the prevailing war mentality. They inspire Woolf’s and Barker’s feminized soldier characters, “feminized” in the sense they are sexually ambiguous, they resist masculine ideology and patriarchal authority, and though they fight bravely, they do not invest themselves blindly in patriotism or social hierarchies. Woolf and Barker both advocate the possibilities of pacifism in their work but also concede and chronicle the considerable social forces which continue to advocate manliness and crush conscientious objections. Woolf’s Septimus kills himself. This act reflects Woolf’s well-developed sense of the necessary integrity of the individual, but is also motivated by how this integrity is about to be invaded by Dr Holmes, who personifies institutional control and rationalism, and sees Septimus’s creativity and madness as unmanly. Barker’s Prior, though he returns willlingly to war and to his own doom, undermines and questions so many assumptions about authority, masculinity and class that he foreshadows challenges to these systems of oppression as the 20th century advances. Both writers insist on the value of a feminist analysis of war. In Three Guineas (1938) Woolf critically analyzes the institutions of patriarchal culture she observed in her lifetime and became convinced they had to be challenged by women, who had to use their influence to end war because they were not socialized to fight in the same way most men were. Similarly, Barker believes men can benefit from feminism because gender roles have cost men greatly as they have been urged to give up their lives, sanity and humanity in wars that Woolf and Barker recognize are created out of powerful ideologies and tend to benefit a powerful few. Their questions about the nature of war, how it can be stopped, and by who, still haunt us today.