Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury avant-garde : War, Civilization, Modernity

orn in London in 1882 and educated in her father’s library, Virginia Woolf came of age at a moment when, as Leonard Woolf put it, political and social movements gave hope that Europe “might really be on the brink of becoming civilized.”¹ Leonard’s prospective formulation reanimates Kant’s dynamic understanding of Enlightenment as no completed, secure achievement but an unfinished and unfinishable struggle against barbarism within Europe.² In the early twentieth century, Bloomsbury modernism addressed barbarities “within the walls” of European civilization, “within our minds and our hearts”: belligerent nationalisms, racialized imperialisms, the class system, the sex/gender system, genocidal persecution, and war.³ For the artists and thinkers of Bloomsbury—among them the Woolfs, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Sigmund Freud, published in English by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press—as for many others, the 1914 war was a “Civil War” that rent what had been an increasingly international civilization.⁴ This eruption of collective violence not only destroyed the illusion that Europe was “on the brink” of an international, economically egalitarian civilization committed to human rights, political autonomy, and world peace but threatened to eclipse even its idea. Before, during, and after the First World War, when democracy’s triumph over fascism and communism was by no means assured, Bloomsbury’s thinkers and artists contributed richly to the struggle for “civilization” in debates on Europe’s future: among other works, Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919); Leonard Woolf’s Empire and Commerce in Africa (1920) and Imperialism and Civilization (1928); Woolf’s great postwar elegy, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), as well as A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938); Freud’s Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929/30).⁵

When Woolf wonders, “But what about my civilisation,” urges readers never to cease asking “what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves,” or pictures women entering the professions as “explorers who set out in crazy cockle shells to discover new lands, and found new civilisations,” the word registers the critical and visionary usages of her moment and milieu.⁶ As Clarissa Dalloway “owed” Peter Walsh “words: ‘sentimental,’ ‘civilised,’” Woolf owes civilization to a discourse formed by Europe’s imperial history, her public-school professional class and its culture, the Stephen family heritage of radical skepticism, and the crisis of liberal democracy after 1914.⁷ As an unschooled daughter of an educated man and an “Outsider,” Woolf entered public discourse by the side door of Bloomsbury—at once heir to the Enlightenment concept of a public sphere independent of state and market, in which private individuals debate the community’s interests, values, and future, and a local, liminal version of England’s masculinized public sphere. Within that extraordinary intellectual and artistic milieu, evolved from her brother Thoby’s Cambridge friendships, Woolf honed her public voice. Through Leslie Stephen and Bloomsbury she inherited the Kantian idea of Enlightenment as unending struggle for human rights, self-governance, and peace in the name of a “sociability” conceived as humanity’s highest end. At the same time, she extended Bloomsbury’s critique of the barbarity within Europe to the women’s movement, not simply as the voice of a “subaltern counterpublic” but on the principles articulated by its leaders: “‘Our claim was no claim of women’s rights only’” but “‘a claim for the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty’” (TG 155, citing Josephine Butler). With this gesture, Woolf not only writes the women’s movement into Europe’s Enlightenment project but asserts its continuity with England’s interwar struggles against rising anti-Semitism and totalitarianism: “The words are the same as yours; the claim is the same as yours,” she tells the male correspondent who has asked her to join a society to prevent war. “The daughters of educated men who were called, to their resentment, ‘feminists’ were in fact the advance guard of your own movement. They were fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as you are fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state” (TG 156).

To frame Bloomsbury in this way is to recover something of its specificity as, in E. M. Forster’s words, the “only genuine movement in English civilisation.”⁸ More often considered a rearguard action in defense of a liberal modernity’s pre-1914 gains, Bloomsbury’s claims as a modernist avant-garde rest on the extent to which it managed to translate the energies of the “hopeful and exciting” prewar European political and social movement into the postwar battle for Europe’s future. If, as Lucy McDiarmid writes, Britain’s major poets contemplated “saving civilization” with fatalistic despair, nostalgia, and “embarrassment,” Bloomsbury’s internationalist thinkers and artists fought in public debate across the disciplines—economics, politics, psychoanalysis, social criticism, arts and letters—for a civilization that had never existed (hence could not be “saved”).⁹ Like Peter Bürger’s historical avant-gardes, Bloomsbury rejects bourgeois culture’s “means-end rationality” and engages art-for-art’s-sake in the cause of “forg[ing] a new life praxis from a basis in art.”¹⁰ But whereas Bürger misconstrues Kantian aesthetic autonomy as “the pathos of universality,” Bloomsbury integrates political and suprapolitical thinking with aesthetics and everyday praxis in addressing a public sphere conceived, in Hannah Arendt’s words, as “a form of being together where no one rules and no one obeys”; where the community’s interest in disinterestedness is continually proposed, if never perfectly enacted; and where the work of art calls people not to see as one but to see differently and then seek to “persuade each other” in arduous negotiation of an always changing sensus communis, or common understanding.¹¹

This view of Bloomsbury diverges at critical points from Raymond Williams’s influential 1980 summation of its “theory and practice”:

This “oppositional fraction” of England’s ruling class, Williams observes, deployed “bourgeois enlightenment” values against “cant, superstition, hypocrisy, pretension, … public show, … ignorance, poverty, sexual and racial discrimination, militarism, and imperialism.” Yet he concludes that, because Bloomsbury’s “supreme value” was not an “alternative idea of a whole society” but the “free … civilized individual,” its “embarrassing” if unwitting legacy is the “conspicuous and privileged consumption” to which bourgeois individualism is now largely reduced.¹³

But Williams’s tracing of post-1945 consumer culture’s “fashionably distorted tree” (which even he finds strange “fruit”) to Bloomsbury’s “hopefully planted seed” risks losing sight of the woods. First, his construction of Bloomsbury as an “evidently incoherent” array of positions falsely naturalized by the notion of “the ‘civilized individual’” both neglects strong, significant affinities among their works and silently discounts the qualifier civilized.¹⁴ Second, his opposition of Bloomsbury’s free civilized individual to “the idea of a whole society” obscures the more relevant oppositions between the civilized individual and the unfree, uncivilized individual—whether a barbaric and tyrannical leader (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin) or a person of any class whose freedom of mind is sacrificed, in Roger Fry’s words, to “the herd with ‘its immense suggestibility more than ever at the mercy of unscrupulous politicians’”; and, further, between democratic and totalitarian social systems—ideas of a whole society that foster or repress freedom to think for oneself, the sine qua non of democratic governance.¹⁵ Third, Williams’s insistence that Bloomsbury was not a “cause” but a liberal modern “style” of “personal relations, aesthetic enjoyment, and intellectual openness” both trivializes the integration of the economic, political, and aesthetic dimensions of public life in its art and thought and turns a blind eye to its “idea of a whole society”: a democratic, economically egalitarian, international civilization, far from realized before the First World War, in crisis and under threat from 1914 until Hitler’s defeat (and beyond) (154, 163). In Bloomsbury’s modernist transformation of and contributions to this “cause” lies a different legacy for a new century still struggling toward global economic equity, human rights, community, and peace.¹⁶

It would require a book in itself to survey Bloomsbury’s contributions to modernist discourse on civilization. Here I just sketch some deep lines of force across authors and disciplines: its internationalist stance at a moment when virulent nationalism prevailed even in England; its analysis of the violence within that “dark continent” Europe and within the self; and its Darwinian sense of history as (in Freud’s figure) a struggle between the “immortal” adversaries “Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species.”¹⁷ While Bloomsbury surely epitomizes what Lyotard sums up as the “Enlightenment narrative in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end—universal peace,” its historical moment resists both any reified, positivist notion of “knowledge” and any postmodern reduction to a totalizing belief in “Progress—Science—Reason—Truth.”¹⁸ Thus Leonard Woolf saw his life after 1918 “ruthlessly” shaped by the fight against totalitarianism and war: “(1) 1919 to 1933, the … struggle for civilization that ended with Hitler’s rise to power; (2) 1933 to 1939, … in which civilization was finally destroyed and which ended with war; (3) 1939 to 1945, the six years of war; (4) the post-war world.”¹⁹ Of course, neither Freud, driven from Vienna in 1938, nor Virginia Woolf, who wrote in 1940 “Thinking is my fighting,” nor Keynes, a historic presence at Bretton Woods, nor indeed Leonard, who published Barbarians Within and Without in 1939, abandoned the struggle for civilization on Hitler’s becoming German chancellor (D 5:285, 15 May 1940). If, as Woolf wrote, “It was no longer possible to believe that the world generally was becoming more civilised” after 1918, they continued to fight against barbarism within (RF 213).

As the 1914 war sucked even “liberal and pacifist” contemporaries such as H. G. Wells and G. M. Trevelyan into its “religion of Nationalism,” Bloomsbury seemed by contrast, Clive Bell wrote, almost a “shrine of civilization,” of belief in reason’s power to emancipate human beings from prejudice and violence.²⁰ Crucial to its “experiment in civilization” was its radical practice of the free speech England’s liberal democracy protected and fostered, at least in principle. As Arendt observes, in a historical crisis “thinking ceases to be a marginal affair”: when everyone else is “swept away,” critical questioning of unexamined opinions, values, doctrines, theories, and convictions “is political by implication,” and the public and principled “refusal to join,” “a kind of action.”²¹ Bertrand Russell’s dismissal from his Cambridge lectureship and imprisonment for protesting the war; Clive Bell’s pamphlet Peace at Once (1915), “publicly burned by the Common Hangman” by order of London’s Lord Mayor; Keynes’s resignation in protest from the Versailles Peace talks; Leonard’s critique of European imperialism in Africa; Virginia’s of the “egg” of fascism in England’s sex/gender system: all exemplify thinking as fighting in the “war for peace” (one of Leonard’s titles).²²

Bloomsbury argued eloquently against a European civil war in the conflict’s early days. Bell’s Peace at Once, for example, deplored the diversion of vast resources that might have gone to combat class oppression to nationalist military violence and asked whether “crushing Germany” “is worth killing and maiming half the serviceable male population of Europe, starving to death a quarter of the world, and ruining the hopes of the next three generations.”²³ Confident that the British Navy would in any case keep England from becoming “a German province,” Bell doubted, in light of Europe’s “morally and materially” international civilization, whether an ordinary Englishman would rather kill and die “than have his children taught German.” The true enemy, he argued, is not Germany but the class system: “everywhere the people are under the thumb of the ruling class,” and ruling classes “are pretty much alike everywhere” (21–22). Pre-1914 Germany, he contended, had been “moving towards a more democratic theory and a more generous view of life”; had English diplomats worked for peace instead of buying into “the game of German militarists,” it would soon have purged the “relics of barbarism” from its political system and joined the “humane, intellectual movement that was gaining ground so rapidly in France and England.” Foreshadowing Keynes, Bell warned that “every month of war” strengthened “the German jingo Party, which will become … the Party of revenge,” and urged his government to propose peace terms acceptable to “the more reasonable part of the German nation,” since “the surest means to another European war would be a peace that humiliated someone” (31–33, 42, 45).

Keynes famously propounded such an internationalist vision at the Versailles Peace talks in 1919, where he served as the British delegation’s chief Treasury representative.²⁴ Condemning the Allied reparations against Germany as a barbaric relic of the militant nationalisms that had led to the war, Keynes sought to persuade the Allied leaders—Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau—to rise above nationalist psychology and lead Europe toward a truly international civilization. As the war was a “civil war,” the Peace was civil war by other means: an instrument of nationalist aggression calculated to enrich the Allied victors at the expense of the vanquished Germans. As such, it could only create the conditions for another war. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written after he resigned from the Peace talks, Keynes pointed out that what was at stake was Europe’s future not Germany’s: the burden of reparations would drive the Germans to “submerge civilization itself” in the attempt to meet their “overwhelming needs” (228) and thereby “destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation” (268). Written against an economic policy bound to foment nationalist aggression, The Economic Consequences of the Peace not only prophesies Hitler but frames him as a barbarian within European civilization, partly spawned by the Allies’ regressive postwar nationalism (a point to which chapter 4 returns).

Leonard Woolf pursued his vision of an internationalist Europe through work on the League of Nations, anti-imperialism, and democratic socialism.²⁵ Recounting the events that led to the 1914 war, military historian John Keegan stresses the Russian czar’s failed initiative of an international court for the peaceful arbitration of disputes between nations, which ran aground on the principle of national sovereignty.²⁶ The League’s failure to avert a second war contributed to Leonard’s view that totalitarian aggression had “finally destroyed” European civilization by 1939. Leonard’s 1905–1911 experience as a British colonial official in Ceylon left him appalled at how long it took his “imperialist soul” to “doubt” his right to be “a ruler of subject peoples.”²⁷ Having witnessed “the white man’s burden of lucrative imperialism”—the agent of “more bloodshed than ever religion or dynasties” and the “chief cause” of the 1914 war—he envisioned the League of Nations as an agency not just to arbiter international disputes but to dismantle Europe’s rival imperialisms and redress some of the damage wrought by “barbarian” Europe upon Africa.²⁸

Following Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness and Edward Morel’s 1913 declaration of partial victory in his long campaign to stop King Leopold’s criminal exploitation of Congo, Leonard’s 1920 Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (1920) analyzed the “almost wholly evil” effects of “Christian European civilization” on African peoples and the “deadly” “material results” of British, French, and German perversions of “such elusive ‘imponderables’ as civilization and barbarism” to serve “racial passion and national ambitions.”²⁹ Reluctantly, skeptically, only on stringent conditions of oversight, and (to judge from his rhetoric) with less faith than profound doubt of reason’s sway over capitalist interest, he proposed making the League a paternalistic “trustee for the native population”—its “only duty” to promote Africans’ political, social, and economic interests by systematic education in self-governance and by overseeing the return of all land and all profits from their land and labor in a “gradual expropriation” of European “capitalist enterprises” in Africa (ECA 362). Like Conrad, Leonard describes the heart of darkness within Europe—the “primitive” barbarity of that “alien civilization” whose “social policy is mainly directed towards safeguarding its most cherished principles, the sacred rights of property” and profit; and whose “right … to civilize” has meant in practice “the right … to rob,” “exploit,” and “enslave” (352–53). Proposing a “science of civilisation” as his “visionary and nonexistent” subject, and anticipating being dismissed as “a doctrinaire, a visionary, and a crank,” he frames “semi-civilized” Europe’s imperialist enterprises as a violent “conflict of civilizations” and (not unlike Keynes) attacks its capitalist “economic ideals” with its human-rights ideal (360).³⁰

From the other side of the Peace, Freud enters the debate on Europe’s future with a searching analysis of civilization’s material and psychosocial economies and (with Bell and Keynes) a critique of class oppression as a cause of war. In The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents, he points to the war as incontrovertible evidence that human aggression is no aberration but an instinct, innate and ineradicable. In exchange for material, social, and psychic rewards, civilization induces its subjects to renounce aggression; but, since instincts can only be suppressed, not eradicated, everyone remains “virtually an enemy of civilization,” and civilization’s economy of renunciation and reward is inherently fragile, easily unbalanced by social and economic inequities that intensify its enemy-subjects’ grievances.³¹ The “decisive question” for war-ravaged Europe, Freud argues, is whether the burden of “instinctual sacrifices” can be lessened and civilization’s enemies reduced to “a minority” (FI 5, 8). As Keynes saw the Peace as an economic war, Freud judges class oppression a formidable threat to civilization, which can pacify its citizen-enemies only by a reasonably equitable distribution of rewards.³² Watching a defeated, oppressed Germany move toward the vengeance Keynes predicted and Russia struggling to consolidate its revolution into an alternative political economy, Freud distinguished privations that affect everyone from those affecting “only groups, classes or even single individuals”: a society that exists by the labor of people allotted too meager a share of its wealth, he predicted, would inevitably incur their “intense hostility” and “neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence” (FI 12, 15–16).

Freud’s critique of class oppression is inseparable from his attack on “religious illusion,” which he, like Marx, sees as a powerful means of controlling aggression (FI 81). Against its irrational picture of a cosmos populated by anthropomorphic gods that exorcise nature’s terrors, reconcile believers to fate, and promise future compensation for earthly discontents, Freud advocates an “education to reality” (Ananke: necessity); in place of the quiescent Christian fantasy of heaven, an activist vision of improving collective life in the here and now.³³ If European civilization is to survive, he concludes, it must relegate religion’s “practical fictions” to its childhood and turn instead to science, which subjects its representations of reality to empirical verification, and art, which makes no truth claims and, in its symbolic gratification of instincts, reconciles people to the sacrifices civilization demands as nothing else can.³⁴

In Three Guineas, her 1938 public epistle to an English gentleman who asks her to join a society dedicated to preventing war and to sign “a manifesto in favour of disinterested culture and intellectual liberty,” Virginia Woolf pictures the barbarian within—“called in German and Italian Führer or Duce; in our own language Tyrant or Dictator”—as “ourselves” (TG 148, 217). As we shall see in chapter 8, her argument that “we cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure” does not consign humanity to the fatality of its own aggression but (like Freud) calls readers to fight on the side of Eros: “we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure” (TG 217).

Leonard’s 1939 Barbarians Within and Without also addresses the barbarism within. Citing Freud on civilization’s economy of aggression renounced in exchange for benefits (65 and n. 11), Leonard tracks the flawed historical incarnations of Europe’s democratic ideal from Periclean Athens, with its economic basis of slavery, to Marx, Lenin, and the Russian Revolution on one hand and to its “semi-civilized” “travesty” in modern Britain and France on the other (BWW 45). The Soviets have “fatally compromised” The Communist Manifesto’s radical democratic spirit by corrupting the economic foundation for “what might have been the greatest civilization in human history.”³⁵ Meanwhile, despite essentially similar ideals, social democrats, communists, and socialists fight each other instead of uniting against their common enemy the Nazi “barbarians,” whom they would otherwise have vanquished (BWW 162). As for Keynes, Freud, and Virginia Woolf, Hitler is a barbarian within as well as without: a monster (from Latin monstrum: a portent; monere: to warn) created by the Allied victors, a pariah who both mocks and mirrors Europe’s semibarbaric “civilization” in scapegoating the Jewish people for Germany’s economic desperation while promising to throw off the Allies’ economic domination and reclaim the German people’s “right to live” (BWW 97, 108). Still, Leonard discounts Hitler’s and Mussolini’s “importance” to Europe’s future, since “even a semi-civilized state like Britain or France” would triumph over fascism if it held to “the principles and traditions of its semi-civilization” (BWW 176–77).

Bloomsbury’s “cause,” in short, was not the grand one of “saving” civilization but the more modest one of fighting for its possibility, in the spirit of Kant as indeed of Gandhi, who remarked that Western civilization would be a good idea. In 1916 Freud had predicted that “our high opinion” of civilization’s riches would lose “nothing from our discovery of their fragility”; “We shall build up again all that the war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.”³⁶ Against Williams’s identification of Bloomsbury’s “supreme value” as no “alternative idea of a whole society” but the free civilized individual, their internationalism, critique of the violence within, and assertion of human agency toward a future understood not as certain progress but as open and free pursue the possibility of rebuilding European civilization on firmer ground and more lastingly. Although Keynes’s intimate 1938 Memoir Club essay, “My Early Beliefs,” has been taken for a sweeping repudiation of Bloomsbury’s utopian faith in “rational individualism,” Keynes no less than the Woolfs and Freud proposed and advocated legal, social, political, and economic institutions to counteract (in Freud’s words) the “truth … which people are so ready to disavow … that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved” but instinctively aggressive against their “neighbour,” who “tempts them to … exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”³⁷ For Bloomsbury it was a question not of any simple belief that “civilized” or “rational” individuals will spontaneously produce a just social order but (as Kant wrote) of creating political and social institutions such as to enable even a “race of devils” to have “a good state” so long as they are rational (that is, unable to will as a general law what would be destructive to themselves), without sacrificing more of freedom and possibility than necessary for one’s “neighbor’s” protection; in short, without resort to totalitarianism.³⁸

Thus Virginia Woolf, attending the 1928 Well of Loneliness trial as a potential witness on the book’s behalf, found herself

impressed by the reason of the law, its astuteness, its formality. Here have we evolved a very remarkable fence between us & barbarity; something commonly recognised; half humbug & ceremony therefore—when they pulled out calf bound books & read old phrases I thought this; & the bowing & scraping made me think it; but in these banks runs a live stream. What is obscenity? What is literature? What is the difference between the subject & the treatment? In what cases is evidence allowable? … After lunch we heard an hour more, & then the magistrate, increasingly deliberate & courteous, said he would read the book again & give judgment next Friday at two [on] the pale tepid vapid book which lay damp & slab all about the court.³⁹

It is “the reason of the law”—as institution, abstract rule, deliberative procedure—and not the “rational individual” that she finds “a remarkable fence” against barbarity; “the reason of the law” that, however imperfectly, civilizes aggression, transforms it into a luxury one can survive by creating an alternative to human sacrifice. To see Bloomsbury’s idea of civilization as more individual than collective, “more a state of mind than a nation-state,” overlooks the interdependence of individual freedom and rational political and social institutions in their thought and art.⁴⁰ To see the “cesspool” discussed in Between the Acts as “a rude metaphor for everything the characters call civilization” flattens the novel into one-note critique, shorn of the depth and complexity of Woolf’s critical and creative vision.⁴¹

One way that Leonard and Virginia Woolf publicly deployed their freedom of speech in the struggle for civilization was by creating the Hogarth Press. Founded as a hobby and run on a shoestring (“L. never makes a penny; I mean—tries to, & I could almost wish we were more lavish in our ways,” wrote Virginia), the Press reflects its owners’ internationalist vision (D3:176, 18 February 1928). Eventually its list had six Nobel Prize authors—Ivan Bunin, T. S. Eliot, and Bertrand Russell in literature, Viscount Cecil, Fridtjof Nansen, and Philip Noel-Baker in Peace—as well as the three world figures Keynes (the Prize in Economics was not yet established in his lifetime), Freud, and Virginia Woolf.⁴²

With volumes on economic, political, and social questions standing cheek by jowl with art and literature, the Hogarth Press shelves present a cross-section of multidisciplinary thought toward “a new life praxis,” as for example in the convergence of modernist aesthetics and feminism. In “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant had criticized those self-appointed cultural “guardians” who would deny freedom of thought to “the largest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex).”⁴³ By the early twentieth century, Woolf’s exact contemporary James Joyce considered women’s emancipation “the greatest revolution of our time, … the revolt of women against the idea that they are the mere instruments of men”; and Ibsen, whose “ideas have become part of our lives,” “the greatest influence on the present generation.”⁴⁴ When Woolf began writing her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), the suffrage battle was raging; in her second, Night and Day (1919), one character envisions each suffrage meeting as “a step onwards in the great march—humanity, you know,” and the campaign’s success as “A great day not only for us but for civilization” (ND 170). Interrupting that struggle, the 1914 war—which, Woolf intimated in a public letter of 1920, might seem almost to have demonstrated men’s unfitness to govern—brought to a crisis a civilization appropriated to masculine interests and existing to a very great extent by women’s uncompensated labor. As Three Guineas argues, Europe’s “civil war” had a parallel in the war at home as women challenged men’s monopoly on public resources, policy, and cultural institutions from education and the professions to the church and political economy.

Virginia Woolf’s work extends Bloomsbury’s dialectical modernization of the Enlightenment “cause” to rights and freedoms long denied “the entire fair sex.”⁴⁵ Three Guineas analyzes the “half-civilized barbarism” of the sex/gender system and challenges both her Bloomsbury friends’ and her public’s uncritical acquiescence in that barbarism (CS 127). Her novels weave the “greatest revolution of our time” into the fabric of everyday life: thus Charles Tansley complains that “Women made civilisation impossible” while Mrs. Ramsay, cringing under a verbal “pelt of jagged hail,” marvels that her husband rends “the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally,” pursuing truth “with such an astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings” (TL 85, 32). From the novel’s stereophonic standpoint, what makes civilization impossible is the barbarous system of masculine domination and feminine sacrifice, even as To the Lighthouse is read today in dozens of languages for the freedom and power of its vision and art—an implicit critique of a civilization based “more on the light of instinct than of reason” (WF 6).

The convergence of women, freedom, and aesthetics brings us to a crux of Bloomsbury’s claim as a modernist avant-garde, for here as in Enlightenment thought sociopolitical critique is integrated with aesthetics. To do justice to the ways (both obvious and subtle) that the influence of Kant, that towering intellectual ancestor of modernity, stamps the work of Leslie Stephen, Freud, George Moore, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell, is beyond this chapter’s scope.⁴⁶ I shall instead attempt to draw out some salient implications of the words sentimental and civilized that Clarissa owes Peter, himself once one of those “young men”—lovers of abstract principles, readers of science and philosophy—on whom “the future of civilisation” depends (MD 50). These words, I suggest, are opposed terms of judgment, to which a third word, disinterested—missing here, but elsewhere in Bloomsbury aesthetics allied with civilized, opposed to sentimental—offers a key. As S. P. Rosenbaum observes, “The essential disinterestedness of art was … a fundamental conviction of Bloomsbury’s aesthetics, which suggests that … Bloomsbury’s … aesthetic attitudes descend mainly from Kant”—that is, from the Third Critique, the Critique of Judgment.⁴⁷

In Kant’s aesthetics, we judge an artwork beautiful when our disinterested contemplation of it gives rise to aesthetic pleasure, which arises from the free play of imagination and understanding. In making aesthetic judgments, we try to set aside “interest,” personal prejudice, and preference—in a word, sentiment (does it go with my couch? does it remind me of my honeymoon? will it appreciate in value? does owning it enhance my social status?). In this sense, aesthetic judgments are—or at least we try to make them—“pure.” By virtue of this disinterestedness, we posit “subjective universal validity” for them: that is, when we judge a work of art beautiful, we posit that anyone who contemplates it apart from personal prejudice and preference will experience aesthetic pleasure—quite apart from whether or not this proves to be the case in practice.⁴⁸ One’s aesthetic judgment, in other words, is binding not on other people but on oneself, in that it requires one to put aside personal interest—sentiment—in making it. By the same token, in putting personal interest aside, one seeks common ground with others, whether or not experience confirms it. In offering disinterested aesthetic pleasure—free from personal interest, use, or purpose; relatively free, too, of particular local, national, and cultural contexts—art indirectly mediates the sociability that Kant considers humanity’s “highest end,” in line with the Enlightenment sociopolitical ideal, the “right to go visiting” (LK 8, 16).

Bloomsbury’s modernist aesthetics resonates with Kant’s emphasis on the artwork’s purely formal beauty, apart from content, truth claims, and external rule.⁴⁹ The artist, Kant writes, does not copy nature but creates “another nature”—a form complete in itself, apart from any worldly design or use, given by no concept and to which no concept is adequate, which arises from the free play of imagination and understanding in the artist and gives rise to the same in the beholder (CJ §49 157, CPJ 192). A work of art that is “beautiful” in Kant’s sense manifests “purposiveness without purpose” in its form (CJ §10 55, CPJ 105). Yet something more than the usual understanding of “art for art’s sake” is at stake in art’s freedom from imitation and use, from the everyday life of purpose and gain. In Kant’s aesthetics it is genius, “nature in the subject,” that gives the rule to art—unlike science, which must subject its claims to empirical validation, and moral reason, which must submit its judgments to moral law (CJ §46 150, CPJ 186). In this originality, the artwork actualizes a freedom that belongs to the noumenal (supersensible) realm, beyond reach of nature’s sensible, phenomenal realm and beyond human will. By creating “another nature … out of the material that actual nature gives it,” endowed with a “completeness” nowhere found in nature, the artist throws a bridge from nature’s realm to the realm of freedom. “We feel our freedom,” writes Kant, in the artist’s transformation of nature’s “material” “into something different which surpasses nature” and occasions thought to which “no concept can be fully adequate” (CJ §49 157–58, Introduction IX 32; CPJ 192, 81). As a form subject to no rule but that given by the artist’s genius—nature in the subject, since genius is inborn—the artwork manifests a freedom beyond human will.⁵⁰ And for Kant, of the “three pure rational ideas” God, immortality, and freedom, freedom alone “proves its objective reality” by its effects in nature (CJ §91 327, CPJ 338).

In this light, “art for art’s sake” might accurately be said to exist for the sake of a freedom that mediates sociability. For the freedom we sense in the disinterested contemplation of art entails an escape from personality, or (in Clive Bell’s memorable phrase) one’s “thick little ego.”⁵¹ To exercise reflective judgment in making or contemplating art is to try to see “things in themselves,” beyond one’s thick little ego (that is, apart from interest, possession, utilitarian purpose); to posit “subjective universal validity” for one’s judgments; to think as oneself in the place of the other.⁵² In respect to Clarissa’s two words, art cultivates a civilized (and civilizing) disinterestedness that tends to enhance the common life and the sensus communis, not by eradicating always interested sentiment but by making us conscious of it as such and so keeping it in its “proper” (from Latin proprius: one’s own) place.

For Woolf, a “feminist” aesthetics is subsumed within such a Kantian aesthetics of freedom from personality and sentiment, of detachment from everyday means-ends concerns, with Shakespeare its example par excellence:

it is impossible to conceive the speed & the control, the violence & the calm, that were needed to write a scene say in Antony & Cleopatra; always to be flying before the break of that gale … now to be [?Pompey⁵³] now to be Caesar, to be some old soldier next & then a girl singer: . . Is it not the freedom of it that most amazes us? … it is the freedom of it that remains overwhelming. One has been liberated; set free—one finishes Antony & Cleopatra feeling that … If Shakespeare had said “I am this sort of man” … had kept popping his head in, … “Daffodils that come before the swallow dares” wd not have been. (WF 163–64)

Far from setting art off from the world, Bloomsbury, like Kant, finds in its beauty a manifestation of freedom that mediates sociability and community—not by imposing canons of taste but by transporting its beholders beyond egotism into (possible) disinterested pleasure, and thence into noncoercive dialogue about the sensus communis, or common values—a function of spectatorship we shall explore in chapter 9. As one spectator of La Trobe’s pageant says, “I thought it brilliantly clever”; as another replies, “O my dear, I thought it utter bosh” (BA 197).

Bell thought Roger Fry’s 1909 “Essay on Aesthetics” the most valuable “contribution to the science” since Kant.⁵⁴ Whatever the merits of that claim, Kant’s influence on Fry, Woolf, and Bloomsbury aesthetics can hardly be overestimated. For Fry, the key to art’s mediation of what he calls “decency and good” is not content or usefulness but purely formal beauty, apprehended in “a disinterested intensity of contemplation” that is not remote from but actually belongs to the sphere of everyday social practices.⁵⁵ Woolf notes that Fry honored the painter Watts because “‘he looked upon art as a necessary and culminating function of civilised life—as indeed the great refining and disinterested activity, without which modern civilisation would become a luxurious barbarity’” (RF 115). Fry’s lectures “encourage[d] the individual to enjoy the rarest of his gifts, the disinterested life, the life of the spirit, over and above our mere existence as living organisms” (RF 236). In the same terms he presented to an appalled British public the landmark “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” exhibition at London’s Grafton Gallery from November 1910 to January 1911: these artists have abandoned “the merely representative element” for “expressive form in its barest, most abstract elements”; and the spectator who can “look without preconception” and “allow his senses to speak” will discover “a discretion and a harmony of color, a force and completeness of pattern” that “suggest visions to the imagination, rather than impose them upon the senses.”⁵⁶ Introducing the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in October 1912, Fry continued,

these artists … do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form, not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life[;] … to make images which … shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our practical activities. In fact they aim not at illusion but at reality. (RF 177–78)

Disinterested and contemplative imagination; not a reflection of actual appearance but conviction of a new and definite reality; not an imitation of nature but an equivalent for life: these phrases flag Fry as a modernist heir of the Third Critique. Remote from mimetic representation, from nature’s “actual appearance,” modern art’s abstract forms incarnate his understanding of art as an “equivalent for life” that inspires “conviction of a new and definite reality,” to be valued not for the sake of knowledge or truth but in itself, for no other purpose than beauty and “the disinterested life, the life of the spirit” that aesthetic pleasure mediates.

The First Post-Impressionist exhibition—Fry’s single-handed intervention in British taste—illustrates the way art offered for no purpose but the disinterested contemplation of beauty can mediate transformations of the sensus communis.⁵⁷ Woolf describes in some detail the “paroxysms of rage and laughter” into which the show threw the public of 1910.⁵⁸ Nonetheless, life was soon imitating art. Two years later, at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition Ball, Virginia and Vanessa “dressed … as Gauguin pictures and careered around Crosby Hall,” scandalizing respectable ladies (MB 200). In 1923 the National Gallery acquired a Gauguin; in 1939 a Cézanne centenary exhibit was mounted to benefit a London hospital. “The pictures are the same,” Woolf observes. “It is the public that has changed” (RF 153). For Woolf herself, as we shall shortly see, 1910 was an annus mirabilis: the English debut of “the Post Is. & ourselves” marked a momentous change in “human character” and a crucial advance in her modernist “re-form” of the novel (L 1:356, 19 August 1908). Integrating aesthetics with internationalist perspectives on economic, political, and social institutions at a moment when the sensus communis was under urgent debate, Bloomsbury challenges myths of modernism as an antirealism “remote from the sphere of everyday practices.” Neither Williams’s “evidently incoherent” group of “civilized individuals” nor advocates of “mere aesthetic[ism],” Bloomsbury contested contemporary reality against conventions masquerading as “realism.”⁵⁹

Leonard Woolf would have been Leonard Woolf, Keynes Keynes, and Freud Freud without Bloomsbury, but what would Virginia Woolf have been? And what would Bloomsbury have been without her? To pose this question is to recall the rare patrimony to which Virginia Stephen was born. Her father, Leslie Stephen, philosopher, author, and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, delighted in her brilliance, tutored her in history, arranged her Greek lessons, and predicted that she would become a writer. His tyrannical temper outraged her, but his powerful, uncompromising, truth-seeking intellect helped to form hers. On the whole he disliked educated women, and he did not send his daughters to Cambridge.⁶⁰ Woolf always insisted that she was “uneducated,” yet her home schooling as this particular educated man’s daughter founded her art and thought on a deeper, more radical skepticism than perhaps even Cambridge, with its centuries of church affiliation, could have done.⁶¹

In fact Leslie Stephen had left Cambridge for just this reason. At twenty-two he was elected a fellow of Trinity Hall; the next year he was ordained, as his fellowship required; in 1859, at twenty-six, he took priest’s orders. By 1860 he had read Mill, Comte, Kant, Kant’s Scottish interpreter (or misinterpreter) William Hamilton, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. His philosophical bent, his biographer Noel Annan notes, “cut short his career at Cambridge”: by 1862 he had lost his faith and resigned as tutor.⁶² Stephen often remarked “the astonishing insularity of the English in the early nineteenth century, their sublime ignorance of the German language and their indifference to German thought and literature” (173–74). His An Agnostic’s Apology (Stephen coined the word and made “agnosticism a party name”) translates Kant’s demonstration that pure reason cannot prove or disprove religious ideas into the language of British empiricism: “There was a simple answer to the theologians. You denied that their subject had any right to exist. The agnostic declared that there were limits to human knowledge and that beyond those limits” lay dogmatism (234, 233).

Woolf’s portrait of the Ramsays in To the Lighthouse honors the legacy of her parents’ radical skepticism. As the Ramsays’ boat flies before the wind in “The Lighthouse,” sixteen-year-old Cam remembers how she often slipped into her father’s study to overhear him talk with his visitors:

Just to please herself she would take a book from the shelf and stand there, watching her father write, … with … something said briefly to the other old gentleman opposite. … [O]ne could let whatever one thought expand here like a leaf in water; and if it did well here, among the old gentlemen smoking and The Times crackling then it was right. …

“Come now,” said Mr. Ramsay, suddenly shutting his book.

Come where? To what extraordinary adventure? … Where was he leading them? … This is right, this is it, Cam kept feeling, … as she did in the study. … Now I can go on thinking whatever I like, and I shan’t fall over a precipice or be drowned, for there he is, keeping his eye on me. (TL 189, 204–5)

Cam’s “Come where? To what extraordinary adventure?” evokes Virginia’s adventures in her father’s library and company. Born English, “restless, … with the waves at their very door,” the Stephen children were tossed naked into the sea by their father at St. Ives and set sail in their London nursery by hoisting a bedsheet over an upended table (DM 31). At fifteen Virginia was “enraptured” by Hakluyt’s Voyages, lugged home for her from the London Library by her father. Later, she described it as less a book than “a great bundle of commodities,” an Elizabethan “lumber room”; these were the prose writers she loved “first and most wildly,” and she found “on mature inspection” that Hakluyt justified “over & over again my youthful discrimination.”⁶³ In the Elizabethans’ “hopes for the future and their sensitiveness to the opinion of older civilisations,” she felt “much the same susceptibility that sometimes puzzles us among the younger countries today, the sense that broods over them of what is about to happen, of an undiscovered land on which they are about to set foot,” and much the same “excitement that science stirs in the minds of imaginative English writers of our own time” (CR2 15–16). These voyages of discovery endow her own metaphysical voyages toward new “lands” and “civilizations” from The Voyage Out on.

While Virginia was “devouring” her father’s library, Thoby Stephen, two years older, was at Trinity College, Cambridge, cultivating the friendships that would evolve into Bloomsbury.⁶⁴ In a letter to her brother, nineteen-year-old Virginia confesses a change of heart as to the merits of “a certain great English writer”:

I read Cymbeline just to see if there mightnt be more in the great William than I supposed. And I was quite upset! Really and truly, I am now let in to [the] company of worshippers—though I still feel a little oppressed by his—greatness I suppose. I shall want a lecture when I see you; to clear up some points about the Plays. I mean about the characters. Why aren’t they more human? Imogen and Posthumous and Cymbeline—I find them beyond me—Is this my feminine weakness in the upper region? But really they might have been cut out with a pair of scissors—as far as mere humanity goes—Of course they talk divinely. I have spotted the best lines in the play—almost in any play I should think—

Imogen says—Think that you are upon a rock, and now throw me again! and Posthumous answers—Hang there like fruit, my Soul, till the tree die. [Cymbeline 5:5.262–65] Now if that doesn’t send a shiver down your spine, even if you are in the middle of cold grouse and coffee—you are no true Shakespearian! Oh dear oh dear—just as I feel in the mood to talk about these things, you go and plant yourself in Cambridge. (L 1:45–46, 5 November 1901)

Shut out from the education that passed the mantle of cultural authority to young men like Thoby, Virginia portrays herself belatedly “let in,” in spirit if not body, to the elite “company” who worship this sacred text in Trinity’s hallowed halls. While Thoby duly inherits Shakespeare, Virginia seeks secondhand wisdom from him and veers between doubt of Shakespeare’s greatness and anxiety about her possible “feminine weakness.” Yet far from acquiescing in her own sidelining, she parlays her “oppressed” admiration into an audacious sibling rivalry—with Shakespeare no less than Thoby. This aspiring Shakespeare’s sister is not too much abashed to criticize Shakespeare’s characters or to pit her judgment against Thoby’s, whose ear for poetry she hints Cambridge luxury might dull. In this epistolary debate on “the great William,” Virginia adroitly moves from uninitiated scoffer to chagrined worshipper to exacting critic to “true Shakespearian”: thrilling to Shakespeare’s “best lines,” she paints herself his true inheritor. And the Shakespeare she fashions foreshadows that of Room: a genius whose characters leave vast regions of “humanity” yet untouched; a national trophy enshrined in bastions of masculine privilege but open to claim by sisters outside the line of succession.⁶⁵

In a 1903 diary-essay, “The Country in London,” Virginia continues to amass intellectual capital from her outsider’s position. “I read—then I lay down the book & say—what right have I, a woman, to read all these things men have done?” she begins, adding cheerily, “But I am going to forget all that in the country. … All the big books I have read I have read in the country” (PA 178). In one breath she doubts her “right” to partake of a man-made world culture and eagerly anticipates a country sojourn that allows her free if covert trespass into the quasi-public arena of “big books” as she practices in private the world spectatorship that is preparing her to enter a masculinized public sphere.

In 1904 the Stephen children nursed their father through his final illness, sold 22 Hyde Park Gate, and together created a new household in Bloomsbury. Virginia had lost her mother at thirteen, her beloved half sister Stella two years later, and now, at twenty-two, her father. In her late memoir she recalls feeling too young at her mother’s death to “master it, envisage it, deal with it”; after Stella’s, “But this is impossible; things aren’t, can’t be, like this,” and then “that if life were thus made to rear and kick, it was a thing to be ridden; nobody could say ‘they’ had fobbed me off with a weak little slip of the precious matter” (MB 124, 137). To be forced to grapple with loss was to appreciate life’s “extreme reality” (MB 137). Educated thus in her father’s library and the University of Life, Virginia Stephen entered a Bloomsbury soon to become a London extension of Cambridge.

Woolf would have had to invent Bloomsbury—for her, not just Cambridge in London but a liminal public where she honed her writer’s voice—had fate not landed her there.⁶⁶ Indeed, she did invent it to a considerable extent, inseparably with herself. Bloomsbury rose from the Stephen family’s ashes as the beautiful, genial, charismatic Thoby invited his brilliant friends to their declassé household near the British Museum for “Thursday evenings.” Vanessa doubted that he meant to include his sisters; “still there they were” (BGMC 105). Many of these young men belonged to the Apostles, the elite Cambridge Conversazione Society devoted to “Athenian liberty of speech and speculation.”⁶⁷ When Vanessa (“strong of brain,” “quick to detect … fallacy”) and Virginia were mixed into this elixir of talk, “These Apostolic young men found to their amazement that they could be shocked by the boldness and skepticism of two young women.”⁶⁸ In Desmond MacCarthy’s account, the openly homosexual Lytton Strachey had enlarged G. E. Moore’s “realistic commonsense” philosophy into a “school” of “personal emotions and personal relations,” of “literature, art and themselves.” Transplanted to Bloomsbury, this free speech flourished in the unprecedented company of women—“a most important change” in social history, MacCarthy notes (BGMC 71).

Virginia, once accustomed to the long silences of “these inanimate creatures,” found she had never “listened so intently to each step and half-step in an argument. Never have I been at such pains to sharpen and launch my own little dart. And then what joy it was when one’s contribution was accepted” (L 1:208, 1 October 1905; MB 190). (Note the shift from I to one: as Virginia begins to speak on equal terms with educated men, including some of her generation’s most distinguished minds, she subsumes the personal pronoun within the impersonal “one”—a point to which we shall shortly return.) However fortuitous and haphazard her poor sister’s education in “the old Cambridge school,” her escape from Kensington convention and hypocrisy to free speech and critical thinking in mixed-sex company seemed not just a revolution in manners but “a great advance in civilisation” (MB 196).

Even as Bloomsbury’s intimate arena of uncensored speech, passionate debate, and rigorous argument provided a bridge from her solitary reading to the public world, Virginia brought to Bloomsbury her father’s legacy: a fearless strength and clarity of mind that could “shock” young men fed on cold grouse and coffee. She was not blind to the advantages of her outsider’s education. In August 1905 Thoby’s Cambridge friends had privately issued a volume of unsigned poems, ironically titled Euphrosyne after the Grace “Joy”; it would have sunk without a trace, Bell remarks, had Virginia “not been careful to keep its memory green.”⁶⁹ Thoby, writing anonymously in the Cambridge Review, had praised the poets’ “originality of imagination, felicity of diction, skilful technique,” and “audacious vocabulary,” but Virginia was less impressed.⁷⁰ In an unpublished review dated 21 May 1906 she mocks these flowers of a Cambridge education. Their posturing authors “come from their University, pale, preoccupied & silent,” as if burdened with “some awful communication,” “a secret too dreadful to impart”; they disdain to “pass their Examinations, because … they despise success” and reserve “their most permanent & unqualified admiration … for the works which, unprinted as yet, ‘unprintable’ they proudly give you to understand, repose in the desks of their immediate friends.” Recently “Some few songs & sonnets” of “these gigantic works were graciously issued to the public”—songs “of Love & Death, & Cats, & Duchesses” such as “other poets have sung before, & may, unless the race is extinct, sing yet again”; “But when taxed with their melancholy the poets confessed that such sadness had never been known, & marked the last & lowest tide of decadence.” Fine-tuning her phrasing, the reviewer concludes, “[There is certainly one advantage in] Among all the [dis]advantages of that sex which is soon, we read, to have no [dis]advantages, there is much to be said surely for that respectable custom which allows the daughter to educate herself at home” and so “preserves her from the omniscience, the early satiety, the melancholy self-satisfaction which a training at either of our great universities produces in her brothers.”⁷¹

Another episode in Virginia’s rivalry with Thoby had occurred the month Euphrosyne appeared. The Stephen children revisited their childhood summer home in Cornwall, and Virginia wrote an account of a thrilling pilchard harvest—the one time in her experience when the pilchards actually came into Carbis Bay, though each summer of their childhood the fishermen had prepared the boats and waited. A newspaper refused the piece, but on reading it Thoby confided to Vanessa that their sister “might be a bit of a genius” (MB 130–31). A year later the Stephens visited Greece and Turkey, and that November Thoby died of typhoid—another “sledge-hammer” blow, more proof that life is a rearing, kicking steed, a thing to be ridden (a figure revived in The Waves, dedicated in spirit to Thoby) (MB 72). It remained for Virginia, once recovered from the shock, to turn her [dis]advantages into literature. In 1907 she embarked on her first novel, titled Melymbrosia; as it evolved into The Voyage Out, Virginia renamed the ship that carries Rachel Vinrace toward imaginary new lands and civilizations the Euphrosyne—putting on the writer’s mantle her beloved brother had laid down.⁷²

Bloomsbury survived its founder Thoby and continued to evolve. In 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell, and Virginia and Adrian moved to 29 Fitzroy Square, where they continued Thoby’s “evenings.” With Clive as her astute and encouraging first reader, Virginia labored from draft to draft of Melymbrosia. By April 1908 she had proceeded far enough to dream that her dead father “snorted” at her manuscript and tossed it aside—an anxiety that did not deter her from aspiring to “re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive” (L 1:325, 356, 19 August). To Clive she confided that she found it “very difficult to fight against” her “inkling of the way the book might be written by other people” and “to ignore the opinion of one’s probable readers—I think I gather courage as I go on. The only possible reason for writing down all this, is that it represents roughly a view of one’s own. My boldness terrifies me” (L 1:383, 7? February 1909).

In that watershed year 1910, the Bells befriended Roger Fry and Virginia’s compositional labors reached a turning point. Woolf’s resonant proclamation in her 1924 modernist manifesto “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”—“On or about December 1910 human character changed”—has long been linked with Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition in that year of public crises great and small: the general elections of January and December; the famous Dreadnought hoax in February, when Adrian, Virginia, and friends masqueraded as “the Emperor of Abyssinia and his suite” and were honored with an official tour of His Majesty’s battleship; King Edward VII’s death and George V’s accession, which in Woolf’s essay marks the generational divide between the “Edwardians” Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells and the experimental “Georgians” Joyce, Eliot, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf.⁷³ That year, too, suffrage demonstrations drew tens of thousands of women who defied middle-class decorum and turned the streets into festive public spectacles hung with striking banners and posters. On November 18 five hundred “Women’s Social and Political Union [WSPU] members marched to the House of Commons and met with six hours of physical and sexual brutality from East End police and bystanders, stirring public outcry far beyond the movement’s constituents.⁷⁴ Out of the fray, Virginia addressed envelopes for the campaign and attended suffrage meetings (L 1:438, November 14). The 1910 suffrage battles reverberate in the leveling of social hierarchies—men over women, masters over servants, authors over readers—that “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” celebrates.

As the phrase “human character” suggests, 1910 also marks a breakthrough in Virginia’s long travails (1907–13) to create her first novel and that as yet nonexistent author “Virginia Woolf.”⁷⁵ Fry’s championing of art that arouses “the conviction of a new and definite reality” appears to have influenced her transformation of Melymbrosia into the protomodernist Voyage Out, for Virginia’s mid-November letter about the suffrage meetings announces, “next week I begin my work of imagination”—“begin,” though she had been writing it for three years; that month too she first mentioned its new title, according to DeSalvo.⁷⁶ To Clive she wrote, “you will have to wait … to see what has become of it. … I should say that my great change was in the way of courage, or conceit; and that I had given up adventuring after other people’s forms” (L 1:446, 29 December 1910). On or about December 1910, this letter and the novel’s genetic text suggest, Virginia—stirred by London’s street-theatre political conflicts, inspired by Post-Impressionist aesthetics, fortified by Fry’s “moral courage” in promoting contemporary art to a volubly outraged British public—devised a new strategy to maintain her “boldness” in face of the censor and the public.⁷⁷ By staging her probable readers’ probable reactions to volatile social issues within the novel, Woolf at once mirrors their passivity and rips through her fiction’s symbolic boundaries to let in familiar but suppressed actualities.

In one scene added after 1910, for example, St. John Hirst tells Helen Ambrose about a letter from his mother “describing the suicide of the parlormaid”:

She was called Susan Jane, and she came into the kitchen one afternoon, and said that she wanted cook to keep her money for her; she had twenty pounds in gold. Then she went out to buy herself a hat. She came in at half-past five and said that she had taken poison. They had only just enough time to get her into bed and call a doctor before she died.

“Well?” Helen inquired.

“There’ll have to be an inquest,” said St. John.

He shrugged his shoulders. Why do people kill themselves? Why do the lower orders do any of the things they do do? Nobody knows. They sat in silence. (VO 306)

With a clue to the mystery (“Why had she done it?”) dangling before them like the purloined letter (“she had twenty pounds in gold”), the characters retreat from this sad news into their class position (“Why do the lower orders do any of the things they do do?”), displaying the obliviousness that (“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” argues) modernist formal experiments seek to disturb. Neither wonders how a parlormaid came by that large sum in gold or why, with such a fortune, the generically named Susan Jane should have entrusted her wealth to the cook, gone out to buy a hat, and returned having poisoned herself. Helen and Hirst are paragons of free and truthful speech; indeed—and perhaps not irrelevant to the matter at hand—Hewet earlier smoothly interrupts Hirst, a vicar’s son, when he brings up in mixed company his father’s observation of country gentlemen’s free, frank passions (VO 202). Yet neither Hirst nor Helen mentions the glaring possibility of a domestic servant “ruined” by a gentleman who purchases her body and/or silence.⁷⁸ Even as it ostensibly observes Edwardian decorum, with its “interested” policing of talk about sex, gender, class, convention, labor, and value, Woolf’s scene calls readers to see what the characters do not—thereby enacting the “death” of the author and the “birth” of the reader that “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (and Barthes) celebrate.⁷⁹

One character in The Voyage Out aspires to write “a novel about Silence, … the things people don’t say.”⁸⁰ In revising Melymbrosia into The Voyage Out, Woolf dramatizes censorship and self-censorship within the narrative by staging socially enforced silences that function as speech acts. Framing the things people don’t say, the narrative shows silence performing ideological work more deftly than words could ever do.⁸¹ Not the text or characters but the reader becomes the potential locus of social transformation—of that change in human character that The Voyage Out does not so much depict as solicit, much as “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” calls its audience to embody—to substantiate—the change it proclaims. “Read the Agamemnon” and see whether you don’t identify with Clytemnestra. Contemplate Jane Carlyle’s death by marriage. Observe the swift evolution of cooks and maids, who once dwelt “like leviathans” in the “lower depths” of Edwardian houses and now breeze in and out of Georgian parlors, borrowing newspapers, modeling hats. Consider how “All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children” (CDB 96). Make reality, not convention, the measure of art. Join in debating a changing sensus communis as a great age of literature dawns. On or about 1910 Virginia Stephen began experimenting with taking Bloomsbury’s free speech public by means of a “re-form” of the English novel inseparably ethical and aesthetic, feminist and modernist. Overtaking the complacently “unprintable” Euphrosyne, the vessel that carries Rachel Vinrace away from England ventures beyond the censor’s patrolled waters toward a future its framed silences invoke.⁸² Formally conservative though it may appear beside her later novels, The Voyage Out is a Woolf in sheep’s clothing—a leap beyond its probable readers’ probable opinions toward a collaborative modernist art.

In 1911, while Virginia Stephen was in the midst of writing The Voyage Out, Leonard Woolf returned from Ceylon. Leonard—who revered Pericles’ funeral oration on civilization’s “unwritten laws”—privately named her Aspasia, after Pericles’ beautiful, learned mistress, famed like him for eloquence and said to be his political adviser.⁸³ In an homage titled “Aspasia,” he pictures Virginia as “the most Olympian of the Olympians,” her room a snowy, windy “mountain top” floating in “illimitable space” amid “precipices & bottomless gulfs”; her thoughts “torn from reality” by a mind “so astonishingly fearless, there is no fact & no reality which it does not face.”⁸⁴ While Virginia’s part in Bloomsbury did not depend on marriage (after all, she and Leonard saw each other daily in their communal household), their marriage in 1912 helped her realize her public voice as the figure he portrays: a poet of reality and a political thinker in a democracy descended from Periclean Athens.

In conversation with Bloomsbury, Woolf/Aspasia developed a sense of Europe’s Enlightenment ideal that underwrites her critique of its historical failures and her vision of its possible future. As chapter 2 argues, The Voyage Out launches Rachel on a quest for an enlightened civilization and frames her death as a symbolic sacrifice at the threshold of a modernist vision. After its publication, eighteen months into the war, Woolf noted of Bertrand Russell’s lectures on pacifism, “Bertie … thinks he’s going to found new civilisations,” adding, “I become steadily more feminist, owing to the Times, … and wonder how this preposterous masculine fiction keeps going a day longer … I feel as if I were reading about some curious tribe in Central Africa” (L 2:76, 23 January 1916). In 1920, in an effort to “‘rais[e] the moral currency of civilised nations,’” she publicly attacked the everyday misogyny at play in a dispute on the Plumage Bill and in her Bloomsbury friend Desmond MacCarthy’s favorable review of Arnold Bennett’s Our Women (CS 121, 6 August 1920). Hinting that men’s confidence in their innate superiority might seem reckless without “more evidence than the great war and the great peace supply,” she likens modern Englishwomen’s new intellectual, social, and political freedoms to those of Aeolian women such as Sappho and predicts that when women enjoy education, “liberty of experience,” and freedom to “differ from men” fearlessly and openly (as she does in Bloomsbury and, owning a press, in public), their cultural contributions will equal men’s. Until then, she concludes, “we shall remain in a condition of half-civilised barbarism,” of male “dominion” and female “servility”—the slave’s “degradation” equalled by the master’s (CS 123, 126–127).

Two stories of the 1920s depict women students entering and changing the public sphere. In “A Society” (1921), women students survey what men have done to civilize the world that women have “populated” and experiment with sperm banks, artificial insemination, and other reproductive techniques until the 1914 war and the botched Peace derail their work, after which one of their daughters weeps to find herself nominated “President of the Society of the future” (CSF 125, 136). In “The Introduction” (1925), Lily Everit inwardly gazes on parliaments, churches, telegraph wires, and Shakespeare and, in a grammatical tour de force, wrests speech and agency from a civilization that would reduce her to feminine passivity: “she felt like a naked wretch who having sought shelter in some shady garden is turned out and made to understand … that there are no sanctuaries, or butterflies, and this civilisation … depends on me” (MDP 43). Parlaying her fortuitous education in the old Cambridge school into a springboard to the public sphere, Woolf enters modern Europe’s Enlightenment project skeptical of “this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves,” prospecting for new lands, new civilizations.

Oh, she is out of it—completely. They—the women, I mean—are out of it—should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse.

—Charlie Marlow, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 1899

Woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it.

—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930

One is not born but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature.

—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949

At once a hereditary insider in English letters and a woman “forced” outside, Woolf casts off from Bloomsbury’s Aeolian island toward a future unimagined by Conrad and Freud. In 1932 she appropriates Russell’s vision of founding new civilizations for women’s emancipation, hailing women embarking on the professions and public life as “explorers” in quest of “new lands, … new civilizations” (P 6). Before we track her own adventures in this long quest, let us first consider two moments in A Room of One’s Own that show how Woolf’s project emerges from and contributes to Bloomsbury’s fight for “civilization.”

A Room of One’s Own reformulates Marlow’s proposition in the following terms: “if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical” (RO 97). That sentence cost its author some pains, particularly in respect to the pronouns. In Women & Fiction (the manuscript version) she feels her way: “not only did the whole of civilisation say These things are important & these trivial {often} against her own ([barely?]) [conception]; but [also] She had no Tradition {behind} {(“For we think back through our mothers if we are women;) … there was no common sentence ready for her use}” (WF 109). Woolf’s she and we extend her own case to the woman novelist as such. Her next try advances further from I to one:

[I] {one} can think [back] through [my] ones mothers, as through [my] {ones} fathers; [I can think] one can think of [civilisation] creating as the [inheritors of] {as a part} civilisation; or as an alien. … when I walked down Whitehall, {there had been} a distinct break in my consciousness; [had] From being the natural inheritor of civilisation, its statues, its government buildings, its triumphal arches, I had suddenly become an alien, a critic: & {as if I had thought back through a different universe to a woman in a tree; who had denied that this civilisation was any of her doing} (WF 142–43)

The move from I/she/we to the universal pronoun one extends the woman novelist’s claim, even as this passage displays rhetorical symptoms of the dilemma of becoming one “if one is a woman” (especially, as it were, “a woman in a tree”). There is no common pronoun ready for her use. In a limited sense, one posits common ground: it asks or presumes assent that whatever is predicated applies to any “one,” although to appeal to such assent is not to produce it. To be outside “civilisation” is to be, in effect, outside one—to be an anomaly, incapable of representing and of being represented. To renounce one—to speak as I, she (the feminine third person representative), or we, if “we” are women—risks acquiescing in this alienation and perhaps even abnegating any claim upon or responsibility for the public world.

Yet to submerge I in one risks assenting to common values that are none of “her doing” and so muting the critical force of her speech—unless, as in the next draft, the speaker at once flags her sex and undertakes to debate those values:

Then, [when one is in the attitude of a writer if one is writing, the a woman (if one is a woman,) so I have as I] if one is writing one thinks back [unconsciously?] through one’s mothers; & if one is a woman, one [cannot] ([when] in writing)[we] is often surprised, say in walking down Whitehall, to find oneself splitting off from civilisation, & from being the [unconsci] natural inheritor of all [these] {the} [streets triumphs of] electric light & locomotion to becoming on the contrary outside government buildings & triumphal arches, [their] an alien, a critic. (WF 146, my emphasis)

In dismantling the opposition between woman and civilization that Marlow and Freud seek to naturalize, this one escapes Houdini-like the female-complaint genre; for ultimately not “woman” but “reality” grounds “one’s” questioning of so-called common values:

Room’s “one,” then, subsumes feminism within the Enlightenment struggle for the rights and freedoms of all and, by the same token, makes women’s emancipation representative of the move from personal oppression to political claims that any oppressed group must make.⁸⁶ As far from Marlow’s “beautiful world” as from Freud’s impotent outcast, this one claims for women public voice—the voice of the people, the demos, the human—and the right to participate in negotiating common values and shaping the common world. This “one” is not prescriptive; it posits but cannot effect a universal predicate. It is a gambit, an offering, an effort to think beyond personal interest to common ground, always subject to contesting claims. Against the mindless herd Fry thought civilization’s doom, against totalitarian longings for “a new god,” it bespeaks the commitment to think for “oneself” in common with others (LK 42–43, 115). Just as Women & Fiction evolves into A Room of One’s (not Her) Own, Three Guineas’ epistolary persona proposes, in the cause of “disinterested culture and intellectual liberty,” to burn the “vicious,” “corrupt” word “feminist”—often deployed to contain and pillory the women’s movement as a special interest, when in fact that movement has historically advocated “the rights of all” and as such is “the advance guard” of 1930s England’s antifascist, antiwar movements.⁸⁷ As Room urges a woman to write in “freedom” instead of “resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights,” Three Guineas’ heuristic bonfire illumines “men and women working together for the same cause”: to fight for Europe’s democratic principles and institutions against totalitarian threats within and without; and to advance Europe beyond “half-civilized barbarism” toward universal economic, cultural, and social rights, democratic institutions, and peace (GR 80, TG 155).

Room‘s first word—“But”—belongs to its audience. This gesture at once preserves the book’s occasion—live “talks to girls,” the students of the Cambridge women’s colleges Newnham and Girton who invited the lectures from which it grew—and hails every reader to debate common values in the public arena. In doing so, it affirms, with Jacques Rancière, that politics is disagreement and opens what Slavoj Žižek terms “the properly traumatic dimension of the political.”⁸⁸ It enacts in small what Žižek evokes as democracy’s founding moment when “Something emerged in ancient Greece under the name of the demos demanding its rights.” Historically (“from Plato’s Republic” to “liberal political philosophy”), the “established powers” play deaf, so that the “political struggle proper” is not “a rational debate between multiple interests” but a struggle “to be heard and recognized as … a legitimate partner” (989). Room’s “But” marks women’s entry into public speech as neither Conrad’s idealized and idealizing Intended nor Freud’s hostile malcontent but as the people, the demos, fighting for precisely an idea of a whole society.⁸⁹ Like The Voyage Out’s parlormaid scene, this dialogic “But” ruptures the textual boundary, presses passive reading toward public voice, and makes Room not merely “about” but actively part of the struggle for civilization.

Having symbolically opened the floor to her readers even before she begins, Woolf piles on de-authorizing tactics, first, by averring that “lies will flow from my lips” and readers must judge for themselves whether they contain “some truth”; second, by donning the symbolic “veil” imposed on Western women in public from Pericles and St. Paul to Charlotte Brontë/“Currer Bell,” Mary Ann Evans/“George Eliot,” and Aurore Dupin/“George Sand”: “Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance).”⁹⁰ But why should this now famous public author veil herself in the Marys of the old Scots ballad “Mary Hamilton”?⁹¹ If it’s of no importance, why can’t we just call her Virginia Woolf? As a sign of women’s anonymity in public life, Woolf’s “veil” at once mimics and transvalues the female burden of “chastity”—“a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons” that has “even now, a religious importance” in women’s lives, so that to “bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest”—that effectively polices the borders of a masculinized public sphere (RO 49–50). Like Judith Shakespeare’s suicide, the women novelists’ masculine pseudonyms attest to

the convention which, if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man), that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est à moi. (RO 50)

Parodying the “fetish” of chastity that has excluded women from participation in public life since Periclean Athens and early Christian Rome, Woolf deconstructs the veil and transvalues its [dis] advantage, making it the sign of an anonymity associated with Shakespeare, the balladmaker “Anon” (often perhaps a woman), and artistic freedom as such.⁹² In modeling her authority on a Shakespeare so little concerned with his name that posterity never ceases trying to ascribe his plays to someone else, Mary/Woolf sacrifices none of her artistic ambition to the enforced modesty that renders the term public woman oxymoronic and obscene.⁹³ At the same time, rather than reify Woolf or anyone as “women’s” representative, this strategically fictional and plural persona submits representativeness as such to the real differences she calls actual readers to debate. Embodying rather than silencing differences, whether of sex, gender, education, culture, politics, or economic status, Room’s open persona (“any name you please”) poses the question of that “creature” woman who, Beauvoir writes, is not born but made by “civilization as a whole.”⁹⁴

Not a few readers take Room at its first word. Its rhetorical interlocutor becomes flesh, for example, in Alice Walker, who augments Room’s outline of Englishwomen’s literary history with African-American women artists from Phillis Wheatley to creators of quilts and gardens; and in Jane Marcus, who sees in these sentences that continue the passage above a betrayal of Woolf’s great-grandfather James Stephen’s abolitionist legacy: “And, of course, it may not be a dog, remembering Parliament Square, the Sièges Allée and other avenues; it may be a piece of land or a man with curly black hair. It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her” (RO 50). Whereas Stephen battled racialized slavery in the British West Indies and, when he passed a “very fine negress, was moved to set her free,” Marcus writes, Woolf “turn[s]her back on” her to “walk[] toward her own freedom.”⁹⁵ In Room’s speaker’s claim that women (“speaking generally”) do not wish to enslave other women—to “mark” them as “one”’s own—Marcus finds a culpable disowning of a woman presumed subject to racialized slavery. She judges that Woolf does not “claim equality or recognize a common humanity with her negress” but, rather, coopts her great-grandfather’s arguments for “feminist claims for freedom and citizenship without relating racial subjectivity to gender” (7). Woolf “does not extend her concept of gender to include a black woman or to imagine her as a fellow exile,” Marcus writes. “Like other feminist rhetoricians of genius, she steals the tropes of slavery to mark the oppression of women, a category that does not include blacks.”⁹⁶

Joining this debate, “one” would surely agree with Marcus’s critique of Woolf’s patronizing irony. Even if Mary/Woolf pictures the negress as free, how convenient for a white Englishwoman, however unfree herself, to idealize her existence as outside imperialism, untouched by colonialism. L’Impérialisme, ce n’est pas à moi, Room’s speaker says of herself and other women, essentializing the barbarous imperialist “instinct” as male; forgetting, too, her own notorious banknote-breeding purse, bequeathed by a colonial aunt in “Bombay,” which plainly implicates her cherished freedom in racialized imperialist exploitation (RO 37). This moment seems all the more puzzling when we remember that Woolf had helped Leonard research Empire and Commerce in Africa.⁹⁷ Indeed, it was very likely she who—taking notes on books in French—found and copied out the thought from Pascal that Leonard chose for the epigraph of his book’s first part, and that Woolf’s passage above echoes: “Ce chien est à moi, disoient ces pauvres enfants; c’est là ma place au soliel: voilà le commencement et l’image de l’usurpation de toute la terre.”⁹⁸ Does this provenance—from Pascal to [Virginia] to Leonard to Room—suggest that Room’s speaker affiliates herself with anti-imperialism in a way that, however clumsy, patronizing, and self-serving, is perhaps as consistent with Stephen’s castigation of racialized slavery as is Marcus’s position? If Room’s speaker imagines the non-European woman ethnographically, as an autonomous subject of another civilization on whom she has no imperialist designs, Marcus imagines her ethnocentrically, as a postcolonial subject whose emancipation depends on the Eurocentric concept of rights Marcus accuses Woolf of restricting to white Englishwomen.

In this light, the passage and the objections it calls out point to the fraught question of the geopolitical scope, limits, and borderlands of Europe’s Enlightenment project in the early twentieth century and beyond. It is historically much too late, Marcus suggests, for an Englishwoman liberated from labor by the spoils of racialized imperialism to pretend that her freedom has nothing to do with women of other races; too late to imagine an African woman as free or, like herself, subject only to men of her own race and class. Yet even as Mary/Woolf displays egregious blindness to her own complicity with imperial domination, Room’s “But” invites objection and dialogue. It hails this and any woman (or man) to join in public debate of the sensus communis; it sets the stage for her claim to be heard, recognizes her right to protest with Marcus, demand her rights alongside Mary/Woolf, toss race and negress on the bonfire along with feminist, or otherwise speak for herself.⁹⁹ As Room’s first word opens the door to a public arena and calls women-as-civilization’s-creatures to speak on equal terms, unveiled and unmarked (a room of one’s own), in the struggle to forge common values and common cause, the last word too belongs to its audience.

Were we ever to see such a bonfire as Three Guineas proposes, Room’s “But” might cease to reverberate. As it is, Walker and Marcus join Kant, Pascal, James Stephen, Josephine Butler, Leslie Stephen, Conrad, Freud, Keynes, Woolf, Room’s now global public, and countless others in struggling toward an ideal of civilization born in the time of Solon and Pericles (that much talked of man), for the sake of a sociability Room’s “But” keeps perpetually in play.¹⁰⁰ Room opens with a call that sounds through Woolf’s oeuvre: to become “one,” to enter history, to think in public and with others about the barbarity and no less the potential of “this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves,” to imagine what it might mean to make it “one’s” own.